When I start painting there's no script, no sketch, no plan. It happens slowly with constant changes. A small painting is worked and reworked on average two years. I do think a lot about my painting but not while I'm doing it. I want to let it go. I don't want to force my intention. I follow what happens. It's like riding a horse without directing it, like riding a horse in an open, endless landscape.

Yes, my paintings have a story. What story? I don't know. I'm curious myself about what's going on. And the landscape, where is it coming from? From the western Catskills where I live now, hills and valleys covered by snow, parallel lines of cornfields partially covered by snow, like scratches of a fork. The landscape in the Florida Keys, where I lived for years. And the vertical lines of Manhattan, too. And always there is no line of horizon; the horizon disappears between earth and the sky.

As for the color: I like strong, clean color. The green, red, blue hills of the Catskills, the red, green, yellow water in Florida, with the red, green, yellow tiny islands of the Keys. I use colors straight from the tube, don't mix them on the palette, with the exception of white, only add thinner and medium. The oil colors mix
when I put clear colors on top of each other, separated by glaze. I don't put wet on wet. I have to wait for each layer to dry before another color goes on. It takes time but that's the feeling I want, rather like using watercolor technique but with oil. And to have a flowing effect, the boards are horizontal when I paint, so the paint spreads.

The goal is space and depth. At times I use lines, a graphic element, borrowed from architecture or industry, as simple as a pole and cable, to increase the depth of the background. After the color and the depth, after the openess is created, the human figures go in one by one. It can take a year or longer to put the second figure in a painting.