Having taken up the study of art history at a late date, I have become aware of the riches I missed out on for so long. In order to learn some of the secrets of what makes a master painting, I have adopted the practice of transcribing paintings from the masters. I find this to be a useful tool in the making of my own work. Knowing that the borrowing of form is considered not only legitimate practice but a necessary one, I am beginning to find the process of painting to be one close to an assemblage of parts; borrowed, quoted, and derived from the artists of the past to achieve the narrative that interests me and to arrive at as powerful a pictorial representation of that narrative as possible. 

This assemblage involves ideas that I like to think are original in as much as the composition of the parts may describe an original visual thought. This is what defines for me the idea of a picture; a visual imagining of a story or, more accurately, a moment in a story.  My own conception of what a picture is differs from  an illustration in that an illustration is an image in the service of a text, whereas a picture is a wholly independent realization of a fictive reality.
 
My purpose in making a picture of a fictive reality is to begin to regard the picture not as fiction but as reality and to make that reality intelligible and interesting to the viewer.
 
Painting becomes far more interesting with practice, and an idea developed over time becomes more compelling. It is in the making of the work itself that I find that much of what I conceived of becomes  subservient to the necessities of the paintings’ course and I must follow accordingly.

“Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed” - Wallace Stevens