Meditation on A Landscape, from the exhibition catalogue After Church, After Cole, Stephen Hannock's Oxbow), Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, 1995, museum tour

Stephen Hannock's The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded, 1979-1994 (Flooded River for the Matriarchs, E. and A. Mongan) is not what it initially seems--a traditional looking, lovingly observed slice of art-historical Americana. But the pressure to regard his composition this way is great. Some of the pressure comes from our tendency to hold onto over-quick responses and some of it is generated by the artist himself. Hannock's reverential title, for instance, compels us to see his composition as an homage to to his artistic forebears--the nineteenth-century, Hudson River School landscapists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church--while the painter's virtuoso technique, poetic light, and insistence on the value of unabashed beauty can seem positively old-fashioned.

Closer looking reveals a work that is as much about personal history as art history. Hannock's canvas also embodies a quintessentially contemporary--and eclectic--approach to art. This is a painting that sneaks up on you: It couples the immediate, sensuous pleasures of vision with a complex variety of possible meanings at which the viewer slowly arrives, as though he or she were traversing one of the many highways and byways that criss-cross the artist's oddly unpeopled vista.

What do we see in this vast, window-like panorama? Hannock's painting offers us a view of the Connecticut River from a hillside that slopes down rather steeply toward an omega-shaped bend in the river known as the Oxbow. The river is flooded, but not dangerously so: undamaged, arched bridges span it like Roman aqueducts; tiny whorls of light that may be headlights twinkle on the highway; and riverside fields are freshly plowed or verdant with vegetation. In fact, nothing seems out of the ordinary, despite the disruption caused by the recent torrent to which the painting's title alludes. A bird's-eye view of a barn in the foreground reminds us of the existence of humankind, while across the river the sun illuminates a few clouds that skitter across the sky as it sets behind distant hills aflame with fall foliage.

Light and color are everywhere in Hannock's Oxbow. The canvas' ruddy, saturated, liver-colored underpainting imparts a warm glow to the predominantly green-, orange- and blue-colored scene. Careful looking reminds us both of the range of tones separating, say, emerald green and azure blue, and the inability of written language to fully convey those gradations.

It is also a reminder that color and light literally merge in luminosity; that color is reflected light. Consider the uppermost bend of the river at the center of the composition. Its gray-blue pearlescence seems to emit a kind of white light that optically marries the painted tones between the reddish underpainting and the bluish surface yielding the reflective whiteness that is subtly but distinctly different from the warmer blue of the sun-tinged skies. That almost steely purity might also subliminally evoke the blueness of the ox and the whiteness of the whale that are emblematic of myth, American-style.

This intense luminosity is, of course, anything but accidental. Hannock has repeatedly returned to the motif of the flooded river, attracted--no doubt--by its potential for varied, luminous effects. On a technical level, he achieves a gleaming, reflective surface by gently sanding his painting with an electric sander. The reflective light captured in various layers of pigment are evenly ground down to throw back light directly toward the viewer. None of it is deflected from an eyeward course--that is refracted in different directions from crannies, nooks, and bumps that comprise the typical paint-surface. Hannock's Oxbow is so highly polished that it can act as a mirror reflecting circles of light from nearby, gallery track-lighting; even old master paintings are nowhere near as reflective as this. If it seems surprising that viewers are unlikely to notice the burnished quality of Hannock's canvases, consider that--as with ballet or basketball--an audience's distracting awareness of technique is generally a sign of failure.

It is tempting to try to assign traditional meanings to the light in this scene. In Western religious paintings, for instance, a beam of light has often symbolized the annunciation, the moment when an angel informed Mary of her sacred mission. Or--closer at hand--in mid-nineteenth-century, American landscape painting by the Luminists Martin Heade and John Kensett, poetically suffused light often symbolizes transcendence and the divinity of creation itself.

To search for clues or to read paintings as texts in need of deciphering, is a peculiarly utilitarian--and American--way of relating to art. The gorgeous luminosity of Hannock's light neither refutes the presence of God nor does it make a particular case for divinity either. Hannock's intention seems simple enough--to provide sensuous pleasure. For Hannock, there's no irony about the creation of beauty; he never cynically places it in hipper-than-thou quotation marks. Although the straightforward provision of pleasure would have been denounced as a trap for the senses in the Puritannical New England of the distant past, today's viewer is likely to delight in Hannock's virtuosity. Consider the brilliantly schematic play of light and shadow--that is, color and color--on the trees stranded in the flooded river. Art aficionados may even detect a kinship between Hannock's forceful handling of light on the trees and Pop-Realist Wayne Thiebaud's similarly colorful and, dare I say, cartoonish rendering of shadows in his succulently painted still lifes.

But let's take another look at those shadows. Just why are we so certain that Hannock's Oxbow depicts sunset rather than sunrise? Viewers who live near the Connecticult River in central Massachusetts know that the sun does indeed set behind the hills of the Berkshires, as Hannock has portrayed it. The rest of us unthinkingly read the scene as twilight, a metaphorical reading that derives, at least in part, from our position as Americans at the end of the twentieth century. The innocent promise of a New World ripe with possibility that the Hudson Rivers painters offered has been replaced with a wistful, fin de siecle sense of opportunity squandered. Instead of paradise, we search for signs of environmental damage.

Although Hannock paints newly plowed and recently sewn fields, it is the blazing colors of autumn that are riveting--and suggestive of winter chills ahead. Thomas Cole, Hannock's forebear, likened the course of empire to the unyielding progression of the seasons. Hannock's twilit Oxbow alludes to, rather than asserts, the likelihood of bleaker days ahead in the waning years of the American century.

Hannock trafficks in this sort of subtle open-endedness, even ambiguity. What seems factual or specific--like the delineation of seasons--proves to be anything but. Picasso's observation that art is the lie that reveals truth is no less apt for being frequently repeated. Contemplating Hannock's Oxbow, the viewer is likely to assume that what it depicts approximates the appearance of the Oxbow itself. But looking out from the spot where Hannock sketched this scene, I found quite a different view. Rather than recreating what he saw, Hannock has boldly dramatized physical reality.

Elevated and cinematic, his perspective on the scene is far loftier than the vista available from the observation point that is now a state historical site called Skinner Park. Despite the flooding of the title, Hannock's painted river is less marshy and more clearly delineated than the real thing, and the painted, aqueduct-like highway bears little resemblance to the standard-issue road running through the area. Likewise, Hannock's horizon-hugging hills are far more boldly silhouetted against the sky than the actual Berkshires range. To say that he has taken liberties in creating his composition is a bit of an understatement.

Such reality-altering changes are nothing new in art. Every landscape painting couples perception, or observed detail, with conception, or the intellectual framework for those observations. The dozens of earlier images of this well-known spot produced over the last century and a half are no more faithful to reality than Hannock's. Pre-modern painters were taught to sketch from nature, then rework and transform those views in their studios. It astounds us that Frederic Church's contemporaries were transfixed by the naturalistic detail of his canvases, while we are struck by the artificiality of their Baroque-derived formula for "framing" the landscape with a foreground ledge--a metaphorical window-sill--from which to contemplate the view. (The American public made Church a rich man by paying to visit his paintings and isolating their naturalistic details through long viewing tubes.)

Photography, too, has changed the way we look at representations of the physical world. Subconsciously, at least, most viewers realize that photographic "truth" is simply superficial factualness. An Ansel Adams picture, after all, looks nothing like an Edward Weston photograph. Deeper truth is a product of selection and intellect; the translation of the facts of place into something more personal.

Hannock's Oxbow, like five hundred years of landscape painting since Bruegel, showcases the painter's evocation of a real or imagined place and then gets on with more important matters. Painted passages such as those along the riverbank at the left and right sides of the composition recall the nineteenth-century, French landscapist Camille Corot's bravura economy of painterly means: like Corot, Hannock indicates trees and fertile-looking earth with a deft touch. The biggest revelation to viewers who have only seen Hannock's painting in photographic reproduction, however, is that Hannock has left the realm of appearances far behind, by literally covering much of his canvas with painted text!

Sometimes legible, sometimes illegible, the hundreds of lines of diaristic text Hannock has inserted in the composition echo the painted contours of ridge line and river bank, hillock and vale. In these subtly visible, scrawled notations, Hannock tells a personal tale of years spent living in and around Northampton in the vicinity of the Oxbow. Each line is located near the place in the real and depicted landscape to which it refers. Hannock provides commentary about his art and his life: "Smith College where I met Bette...had my first exhibition." (Bette, one of the two, art pioneer-matriarchs of the painting's title is Elizabeth Mongan, a former curator at the Smith College Museum; the other is her sister Agnes Mongan, the former director of Harvard's Fogg Museum.) Or, referring to the well-known, contemporary realist-painter Alfred Leslie, "Alfred did a piece in the 70s, but it didn't do it for me."

Striking a far more personal--and cryptic--note, we can read that "Boz and I put in some serious time with the frisbee" (Hannock was a champion frisbee thrower) and "Gordon the wacko almost blew Jimmy's head off with an M80." Whether or not a viewer can decipher, much less understand, all of these notations is less important than the realization of Hannock's personal connection with this place. Although he dates the piece to 1979 when he first began drawing the Oxbow, the notations psychically date the piece to the early seventies, when he arrived in the Connecticut River Valley to attend Smith College.

Hannock's textual annotations also comment on the topography and social life of the region. An arrow points to Mount Holyoke College, which is located off the canvas; another notation reads "this way to the Berkshires;" and a third indicates a point in the river "where all the skippers get loaded and crack up their boats." His identification with this scene is complete. Where modernist painters asserted their personality through signature-style slashing painting or otherwise visible brushwork, Hannock has literally written himself into the terrain through these pale pentimenti. Hannock's approach less resembles Jackson Pollock's egotistical proclamation that "I am nature," than Thomas Cole's depiction of himself, painting at an easel, in his Oxbow.

For Hannock, Cole's Oxbow (the Connecticut River near Northampton), painted in 1836 and now housed in the Metropolitan Museum, offered both inspiration and challenge. (By contrast, he has never seen Church's rather conventional and charmless version of the scene painted early in that artist's career.) Cole's idealizing, European aesthetic put him at odds with an American taste for the specific and factual. His Oxbow is far more monumental than the informal "views" he had previously produced and was painted on a scale commensurate with the Arcadian landscapes evoking the classical past for which he is primarily remembered. What made Cole's Oxbow revolutionary was its freshness, its sensitivity to light, and its unlabored looking naturalism. A landmark in American painting, it provided a model for the Hudson River School painters who built on Cole's accomplishment. Hannock consciously made his own Oxbow slightly larger than Cole's, indulging in a sort of latter-day one-upsmanship.

Hannock's Oxbow should also be understood as a rejection--albeit a far from theoretical one--of Modernism; that is, the artistic practices of the recently ended century that marked Western civilization's uneasy accomodation to the industrial era or machine age. To eyes accustomed to the late modernist succession of avant-garde, mostly abstract styles ranging from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism, Hannock's painting may seem stylistically backward looking, or even incomprehensible. It is distinctly different. Where the modernist painter eschewed the look of the past, Hannock artfully comments on it. His postmodern approach is also symptomatic of a kind of engagement with nature that largely disappeared from Modernist art of the twentieth century.

Modernism's less-is-more ethos, its often powerful purity and reductionism, has been replaced by the messy complexity of a post-modernism that tries to mirror our messy, decidedly impure existence. In art today, more is more. Who can deny the relevance of Hannock's multi-faceted concerns for history and an attachment to place, his clear-eyed love of beauty and sensuosity? The end of modernism has broadened art's scope. Although postmodernism's acknowledgement of contemporary complexity hardly guarantees satisfying art, it does offer artists myriad options and opportunities foreclosed by the narrower and more prescriptive views of art associated with Modernism.

The most compelling painting of the nineties is dependent upon the concerns of non-object, conceptual art of the seventies and eighties--the era of Modernism's demise and Hannock's artistic coming of age. While Hannock's work pays more-or-less conscious homage to the Barbizon and Hudson River School landscapists, as well as to the light-shot dramatics of Whistler's nocturnes, he is also quintessentially contemporary in his identification with the landscape. This attitude links Hannock's Oxbow with stylistically very different artists of the past two decades such as Dennis Oppenheim and Ana Mendieta. Unlike Hannock, these non-painters, or so-called body artists, utilized radically non-traditional modus operandi to engage matters of body and being in nature. The former "painted" a landscape on own his body by sunburning a (negative) image of a book on his chest, while the latter produced earthen body-casts of herself in poses reminiscent of ancient goddess figures from the Near East.

A subliminal awareness of Hannock's--and, by extension, the viewer's--physicality also inflects his work. At 81" wide, his Oxbow is just the size of an adult's outstretched arms. One of the artist's text inscriptions reads "My view is 100 yards off the hang gliding launch." Gazing at his work, it is easy to imagine leaping into this panorama. But for our contemporary Icarus there'd be no danger from the sun melting the wax wings of classical myth. The sun is setting over the Oxbow; the rising of the moon is imminent. Hannock would surely portray its silvery evanescence with luminous intensity. How poetic is his reverie about place and nature and history. How bittersweet!

Robert Atkins: Let's start by talking about the Connecticut River. It's played such a formative role in your art.

Stephen Hannock: Much of my work is based on my experiences on the river. I hang out in a little rubber boat and I see so many different plays of light on the river. That's why a lot of my paintings don't have foregrounds. Being on the river at in-between times of day is when things come together for me. Those moments are the starting point for my compositions, even though they don't seem to be images of the river.

RA: I'm looking at these three similar sunrises over flooded rivers. One is small, one medium and one large; and in one the sun is much higher in the sky. Yet it's clear from their states of completion that you didn't move from small to medium to large. What's the step-by-step process in your work?

SH: They begin with sketches. First there's a gouache sketch of the composition and the temperature comes second. The sketch tells me where the luminosity is applied. But you're right, I don't usually start with a small canvas that leads to a large one.

RA: So the sketches are black and white and gray. They're tonal and the color comes later.

SH: The color has primarily to do with temperature. When I visually see the temperature of the light I want to create, then I start working on the painting, which begins with the underpainting--the color you want to come back down to. If it's a warm color I start with cadmium pinks, or if it's a cool color I start with umbers or ochres as a foundation.

RA: It's all in your head then? You don't have a file of sketches and color studies?

SH: I have done those kind of studies but in a general way. Let me show you.

RA: These are from imagination. So you're like a pre-Impressionist painter who does it all in the studio, rather than painting out-of-doors or relying primarily on sketches from nature?

SH: Absolutely. Let me also say I don't use photography. By flattening everything and destroying the visual rhythms, it gets in the way. There are things you can't see in a photograph and I'm not interested in moving in a literal direction. I have to keep the big Florence piece in the show from becoming a literal cityscape. I did a number of Manhattan cityscapes that frustrated me with the geometry [of their subject.]

RA: So now you're painting...

SH: Right. Then a lot happens spontaneously as you build up layers of paint that tend not to be literal representations of those things in life--colors or shapes. I come back to the work with successive paintings and polishings with a power sander. I build up the layers of paint and then polish them to get the even, smooth surface while taking into account the accidents that happen when the paint is removed, built up, and polished down in three or four stages. I'm learning how to remove certain things that will make a pronounced statement a couple of layers down. This show has pieces that have been given the time to grow. They've had time to marinate, to help each other out. That's why it's important for me to keep a lot of paintings in my studio environment.

RA: So you think of the work in technical terms, rather than in thematic groups like the Flooded Rivers or the Rockets?

SH: I'm always bouncing between the technique and the theme. It's like a wild bobsled ride. You want to go down the chute without touching either side. But I tend to careen off both sides. One side is more literal images with horizons, the landscape. The other side is either the starbursts or responses to light without the literal landscapes. I tend to move back and forth, toward and away from the literal.

RA: One is more free and imaginative? And one is more structured and reality-based?

SH: Right. I seem to drift into abstraction, but then I come back. The big Florence painting is a case in point. I want to capture the rhythm and texture of the city and then there are the specific buildings that I don't want to get too caught up in.

RA: How do the Whistleresque rockets fit into your life?

SH: The rockets came from a trip to Southeast Asia a few years ago. I saw the squid boats in the South China Sea and Gulf of Siam. At night the horizon was speckled with them like a necklace of luminous pearls that were brighter or dimmer depending on their distance from you. They took on abstract forms against the sky and the ocean. Then I imagined them as rockets taking off, leaping into the sky. I have to confess that I've also dabbled in pyrotechnics. We used to shoot them off in the Connecticut River but they're never as spectacular as what's in my mind. I see these places or things that happen in them and it takes time for them to distill in my twisted little head. That's where the neat exaggrations and distortions take place.

RA: So all your paintings are--to a lesser or greater degree--a meditation on your past, like The Oxbow?

SH: Well, the Connecticut River is where these light events happen to me. I'm also spending lots of time in Montana these days and I feel a Bierstadt-esque composition coming on. Something vertical, but it's not there yet. I sometimes think the rockets have to do with a frustration with the horizontal. I have some Tuscan scenes in mind that are also vertical. I love the way the hills and vineyards seem knit in a tapestry.

RA: I've always thought horizontal paintings have more to do with our physiology, the way our eyes are positioned in our skulls. Your work always seems "shot" from an ant's eye or a cinematic perspective. Like the opening of Apocalypse Now shot from a helicopter.

SH: It's probably unconscious. The phosphorescent paintings I did under black light were literally movie screens. Painting with light is still a great way to get certain effects, but you have to see them under overly-specific lighting conditions. You want to speak in a more conventional language in order to reach people.

RA: You just had a show of the phosphorescent paintings in Los Angeles, didn't you?

SH: Yes. Under the pseudonym of J.W. Frost. Frost is my grandmother's maiden name and a cousin of mine in Seattle is handling all the phosphorescent work.

RA: Why the pseudonym? Do you think artists have to have a signature style?

SH: I started using the pseudonym a few years ago and it's cut me a lot of slack. People were always trying to connect what I was doing with the polished oil medium and the phosphorescent paintings. Physically the phosphorescent medium is so much more difficult to work with. What I'm doing with the polished oil paint can't be done with phosphorescent paint. Frankly, I've kind of lost interest in it. This summer in Seattle I'll be coaching some artists in using the colors I've spent 25 years developing.

RA: You also have this other body of work few people have seen--the self-portraits.

SH: Yes. They'll get shown. Every few years I find a reason to do one. They're a lot of fun and they're very different than the unpeopled vistas. They're cathartic. In 1984 or '85 I did a self-portrait celebrating my sister coming out of a coma. That day I did a woodcut self portrait and then I blew it up onto a canvas that became part of a diptych. I'm working on one now that will probably be done next year. It's a tribute to painters and friends in New York who have influenced me. It'll be an expressionistic painting of me with trompe l'oeil images of their works attached to it and the view outside the window will be Tuscany, not Manhattan.

RA: But you're the only figure in it. Why have you avoided the figure--the premier subject of Western art?

SH: I just haven't had any ideas that excite me. I can draw. Leonard Baskin locked me in his library with human and equine anatomy books and models 'till I could draw. I hated it, but I remember when it clicked: suddenly one day I could draw with both hands without looking at the paper.

RA: You're ambidextrous?

SH: Yes. It's like crossed wires. When I can do it with one hand I can do it with the other. I paint with both hands. The rhythm you get with the water comes from using [palette] knives with both hands. You get some great accidents that way. I've had assistants who insist it wasn't fair.

RA: You mention accident a lot. What is its role in your work? I know you accidentally revealed all the text written beneath the paint in the Oxbow painting [The Oxbow, After Church, After Cole, Flooded 1979-1994 (Flooded River for the Matriarchs E. And A. Mongan] and left it that way. But you haven't done any other paintings with texts, have you?

SH: No. It's funny. But I do feel like a curator of accidents.

RA: How do you define accident?

SH: It's something that happens with the paint that you encourage, rather than do deliberately. You've written that my work is very different from some 19th century painters and it's true, in part because they were so deliberate in the way they applied paint. To get luminosity, I'm interested in flooding the paint in certain areas and letting it act like itself. Then I interrupt it when you least think it should be interrupted.

RA: That makes me think of Jackson Pollock or Helen Frankenthaler going with the flow of their materials.

SH: I'm convinced that Pollock did a lot of his work in the air. He drew designs in the air and the paint just fell. He'd make gestures so the paint sprayed in the air. Those gestures made things happen on the canvas. You get into a calligraphic rhythm. It's what I do with the skies. After the paint is removed and polished, it's always a surprise to me. Being too careful kills the process. I've wrecked plenty of works with polishing, but when you're more careful it never works.

RA: Is your process akin to dancing or sex or sports? Meaning that you're very well trained and the technique works until you think too much about it?

SH: Marion Brown the saxophonist noted that you have to respond spontaneously to unexpected events. I heard him listen to a recording of his 24 hours after it was recorded and say "Did I do that?" That's what you do as a painter.

RA: Or a writer. Zen mind is a term some people use.

SH: Pollock would get really loaded.

RA: I guess it all depends how much spontaneity you want. When you mentioned Ryder removing paint, it made me wonder if there's a whole school of paint removers. Maybe a spectrum with Jay de Feo's Rose on the additive end? Or a hidden history of quirky techniques?

SH: That's an interesting idea. You never see the removal in reproduction, but you see it immediately in the work itself. Bill Jensen is doing significant removal when the paint's wet.

RA: Does anyone else sand?

SH: Sand? Sure. Polish? I haven't seen any--polishing being the use of a succesion of finer and finer grits. My sanding and polishing began accidentally. It happened in 1984 or '85 and it took me time to know how to work with it. I did a view of the double church spire in Northampton and the painting was so bad I ripped into it with a sander. But it took a long time to take that accident and use it without suffocating it.

RA: Do you sand just part of a painting; say a passage that's not working?

SH: Good question. When something's happened in part of a painting you have a tendency to want to polish it really carefully. But that's against the rules. You've got to polish the whole thing and risk wrecking some lyrical moments. You gain far more in the final statement that way. You just have to go with it.

RA: You must be constantly surprised.

SH: That's the fun of it. That's why I don't have so much fun painting in the dark anymore. This process of creating-destroying is more sophisticated. This writer friend pointed out that's how landscape gets made; by destruction, by glacier or storms. Although, as you know, I don't think of myself as making landscapes.

RA: Do you have a label for what you do?

SH: I paint light and hang it on things. I've tried hanging it on people or genre scenes, but when you have a human form in the composition you look at it. With an unpeopled vista you look through it into the non-event. It's more open for the audience.

RA: Do you make your paintings for artificial light?

SH: I make them in the daytime--or at least check the color in daylight. Subtle shifts in warm tones can be invisible in tungsten. You want to make sure painting works in all kinds of light.

RA: I know you're more interested in Whistler, Ryder or the Luminists than in Church or Cole. But what about more contemporary "light" artists--say Mark Rothko or Robert Irwin?

SH: Irwin is interesting. It's an installation thing and I always think that way in connection with a show. I'm drawn to Rothko for his moods, but I love Ad Reinhardt more. And--this will surprise you--I like Rockwell Kent, too. But the Reinhardts are so moving in their subtlety.

RA: Who are other artists who matter to you?

SH: Turner, Blakelock, Kensett, Inness--I feel close to him for his removal process. He would use cloths to wipe canvases. Others are more contemporary and quirky. Red Grooms, for example, is a reminder that if you're not having fun, there's something missing. That's an important lesson.

RA: Do you think much about the metaphorical implications of light?

SH: Sometimes. It shifts in being foreground or background. There's something so optimistic about the river in flood stage. Let me be clear that I'm not talking about bursting levees on the Missisippi, but the cleansing, spring-time floods that come through every year. It's a metaphor with optimistic environmental and political ramifications.

RA: Do you get static because your paintings are beautiful? You don't put beauty in ironic quotation marks like so many post-modern painters.

SH: I cringe when people say they think my work is beautiful. I think of the model who said, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." I'm glad viewers are drawn to my work, but it bothers me if people think it's sentimental. I cringe at the thought of being compared to Maxfield Parrish. Having canvases that appeal to a wide range of people can make you think you're avoiding tough issues.

RA: Academic painting that seemed beautiful to mainstream audiences a century ago, often seems like it pandered to its audience. It isn't rigorous enough.

SH: Maybe that's why I rip into my paintings with power tools; I've never thought of it that way. It's certainly not precious. A writer-friend speaks of the paintings as stage settings for non-events. Writers are often attracted to my work, I think it's because mood is so important to me. I'm not trying to paint sunrises but an environment in which that event might take place.

RA: I see a hard-to-articulate kind of literary quality in your work. You're dealing with mood--a Symbolist preoccupation. And also with what 19th-century thinkers called synesthesia. That was an attempt to describe the emotional effects of color or sound and their equivalents a la Whistler's borrowing of the musical term nocturne. Then there's the Luminist connection with Transcendentalist writing.

SH: Yes. But oddly what I read aren't the visual writers at all but people like Jim Harrison who deal in character. He wrote a book called A Woman Lit by Fireflies. At a rest stop, this emotionally abused wife takes off into the Iowa countryside and I see her cowering in the bushes, lit by fireflies.Although I've never done a painting from a book, her state of mind and her mood that fascinates me.

RA: So the stage set, rather than the plot.

SH: Yes. Insisting on a certain level of mystery in the works makes the interpretations constantly amazing to me. It's a sort of setting the stage again.

RA: Do you feel boxed in by those interpretations that constantly refer to 19th century painting?

SH: I like what Wayne Theibaud said about being called a Pop Artist. He was just thrilled they called him anything.