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I really learned about art in D.C. I took the train there from my house. I went to the opening of the Hirshhorn, saw Henry Moore the day he installed his sculpture in front of the National Gallery. Crossing the mall in the heat of the summer to go from one great museum to another was a journey. Kind of a sacred space. Even though I lived in New York for half my life, D.C. is where I live as an artist in my head.

I enter the studio coffee in hand. There are usually multiple works in progress. New canvases or sometimes ones pulled out of the pile that were never finished or have to be updated. Usually, some sort of discussion in my head. Which paintings are calling me to move forward today? The works have different vibes or voices. I don’t work in series or variations of something. Always a separate story. Work from different times painted in different ways. They are different songs, different kinds of songs.

I don’t consider myself a figurative painter. I rarely observe things with my eyes. For me, making a painting is about getting it to feel right—something that’s in my own voice—does it seem right? Is it speaking my voice, my words, my ideas? As I’ve gotten older, I rarely pull the art books off the shelf anymore to find a way to make something. If I’m looking, it’s usually to push myself to be all in, for the work to be complete.

I never made studies for paintings most of my life, and I really don’t now. Four years ago, I fell in my yard and broke my ankle. For about five months, I couldn’t work on painting. I made watercolors and drawings while sitting on my living room couch watching tv. Old visions, new ideas filled pieces of paper and notebooks. These led to a new group of paintings the following summer. The really important bit was that I started making drawings and things on paper in a manic, obsessive way.