When Elizabeth and I moved to Vermont nearly twenty years ago, the first thing we did was create a space to paint. Behind the attached garage there was a 16 x 24 ft. workroom the builder had used as his carpentry shop, which we thought would make a good temporary studio while we settled in.

There are some paintings I have thought about a lot and with which I have long relationships. The recently rediscovered Velázquez Portrait of a Man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of them.

Virtually every artist, from the time of cave painting to the dawn of non-objective art, will tell you they paint what they see. Painting what you see seems like the most obvious and simplest thing in the world…until you try to do it.