I find the ordinary exotic. I look at a crowd in an illuminated bus shelter at night and think it’s as stirring and mysterious as anything imaginable. Painting the familiar world around me allows me to discover my connection to things, and also to explore their connections to one another.

As I’m painting I’m searching for the code that needs to be cracked. There is some abstract underpinning that drives the work- something like orange vs. blue, or deep shadows against raking light. I have the image already; the subject is clear. But there is a color or compositional architecture I need to find that's subliminal to whatever the subject is. This structured but informal dance of color and shapes is what I look for to make the everyday job of painting an image thrilling and worthwhile.

Light then serves to set the stage and the tone for these relationships which become like little dramas unfolding before me as I paint. I love how the world of tangible, separate things can be bound together in a fabric of light. And whatever story I have to tell, I am most compelled by how the subject dissolves into the light and space.

I have been doing portraits nearly all my life, ever since I started to draw as a young child. I have always been fascinated with capturing likenesses, I suppose because it has been one way of exploring my relationship to the social world. Finding someone through art is a way of appropriating them: It feels to me as though I were an actor finding a character, or perhaps a novelist creating one. It’s a way into the mystery that is another person, or even oneself, if it’s a self-portrait. ( I do many of these!)

When I paint my own family, I am exploring the tender dynamic that exists between us all. When I paint other families, I am also considering the dynamic of the relationships between people. I try to find an image that will capture this experience. So I explore a culture, so to speak, each family with their own way of being together and in the world.