Was it refreshing to do some landscape painting? Did you work off of a photo or plein air?
AR: It’s my personal interest to only work from life with my oil paints, never from photos. Over the course of my A Painting a Day series, I’ve been most interested in working with simple and intimate still life set-ups. I also have felt inspired by interior spaces, particularly one of the windows in my studio. I absolutely loved painting the landscape in Italy. It is so vast and breathtaking and indescribably stunning. I could spend years, or even a lifetime painting there. In some ways, painting the landscape in Italy was a big change for me. Still, however, I approach painting in the same exact way no matter what it is I am looking at. I am interested a direct, felt response to that which I am painting. In this way, it does not really matter what I am painting, particularly because painting language doesn’t include the language of nameable “things.” In other words, my subject matter is the response, not the physical object/scene. Incidentally, the ability to do this (access a direct
