There is a point of choosing a subject (frequently because of some inscrutable sensation) and afterwards, a point in working from it in which the object or subject lose its expected and understood identities and I paint at a different level of consciousness---the act of painting that brings it to the level of meditation or dreaming or prayer. When I look at an insect’s leg or the anatomy of a cabbage with such intensity, for example, for hour after hour, I have the sense of time, extraordinarily altered, and a level of knowing that is foreign to faster observation. This tempo can take on the gestalt quality of a word repeated with mechanical sameness and its loss of original identity through the brain’s intolerance of sameness. The slow gestation of the piece creates an identity quite different from viewing the original objects or a mechanical image of objects. It is as though I live with the tensile qualities of air and water rather than the weight of gravity. Francis Bacon stated, in The Great Instauration, a working definition of art : “Seeing that the nature of things betrays itself more readily under the vexations of art than in its natural freedom. Art does not simply imitate nature, nor is it a play of the imagination, but rather it is the technë or craft that enables us, through constraint to grasp nature.”