You have asked that I provide some background explanation regarding my work and myself. Of what possible help this could be to your readers, I have no idea. I find it amusing that painters are so often asked to speak about their work, as if our insights shipped off alongside our paintings will be of any benefit or interest. But I suppose it has always been this way. Otherwise no one would have said as they did of Delacroix, "He's such an intelligent man and so charming. What a pity he is a painter."

I am grateful Pietro Lorenzitti left no letters, diaries or guild notes. I doubt my knowing his thoughts about his paintings could explain my sensations watching a beam of sunlight fall on the Angel of Annunciation and move slowly across his altarpiece in Arezzo. I doubt anything in his biography could have prepared me for the aching tenderness I felt seeing his fresco of the Crucifixion as it seemed to hover high on the wall in the dim light of the Church of San Francesco.

Like Pissarro–Pissarro, whose letters have not helped me when confronted by the pure humble fact of his paintings--though I look at my canvases constantly, I understand them only in rare moments when I have forgotten all about them, when all my intentions and habits of thought have fallen away. What I then experience is often simply a felt answer to a silent problem. Much of what I am after is painting the quality of light. And my goal is to have each painting look as if it came about in the most natural, relaxed, and effortless way.