There’s a scene in the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line where Cash (Joaquin Phoenix) is auditioning for Sam Phillips (Sun Records). After hearing a minute of Cash’s weak rendition of a familiar gospel song, Philips stops the audition and asks Cash a single question: “If you was hit by a truck and you was lying out in the gutter dying and you had time to sing one song, one song people would remember before you’re dirt, one song that would let god know what you felt about your time here on earth, one song that would sum you up, you’re telling me that’s the song you would sing?” Cash’s response is to launch into “Folsom Prison Blues.” The rest, as they say, is history.

A couple of years ago I began asking myself similar questions about every painting I make. I put as much of myself as possible into the work. Sometimes I love the results, sometimes I don’t know what to think—those often end up being the best ones.

About two years ago I returned to painting with oil on stretched canvas. This was after many years of working with acrylic house paint on unstretched fabric, and making paintings and installations from recycled textiles I cut up and sewed together. I don’t think I will ever go back. Most of my recent paintings are inspired by my flower garden as it lives and dies seasonally, and by the woods of upstate New York, but as soon as I start painting, those things cease to matter. I paint “inscapes,” not landscapes.

I’m an art-history obsessive and constantly look at Vuillard, Bonnard, Burchfield, Mitchell, Twombly, Kirkeby, Oehlen. . . . but the kind of painting I want to make is, to paraphrase Sam Philips, is “something different, something real, something I feel.”