Entrance (detail)

The novelist E. L. Doctorow described creating a work from imagination as being like driving at night: you can see only as far as the beams of your headlights moving through dark landscape towards an unknown destination. Artists learn to trust those present moments of illumination.

Northwards

I'm driving home to Vermont tomorrow, and will have eleven hours to listen to Arcade Fire, "Persuasion" (for the fourth time) and old Ricky Gervais podcasts. I don't mind these long solitary trips. I can think ahead to new paintings, and look at the landscape shifting back into winter as I head north.

Cousin Ann

My mother was an early patron, and her house is full of paintings she purchased from me in the lean years after I finished art school. She commissioned this portrait of her cousin Ann, orphaned as a child, whom my mother remembered with love for both her kindness and sadness.

Watching TV

My mother has been an obliging model since I started in high school filling sketchbooks with drawings of her napping, reading the Post, or watching "Mash", which she is still doing here.