I paint from imagination, even though the final image always resembles the “real” world in a general way. For me a painting begins with an intuition of how simple motifs like trees or a repeated pattern of railroad ties might be distilled into something fresh that comes across more as poetry than as prose. As Morandi said, “There is nothing more surreal and abstract than reality.” A freight car is an efficient conveyor of goods, but also an interesting arrangement of shapes and colors, something with a potential to be defamiliarized, to become what Wallace Stevens called a “supreme fiction.”
