AB: [...]From the Proof Paintings there's a chalk-line. The chalk line is evidence of something, a missing body or a subject missing from the center. Then after a while you describe it as a constant like a word or a number and at the same time you start to make monochromes. Is there a subject in the monochromes?

AW: After making images for years and trying to understand them. How people look at paintings in a museum, they often look quickly or sometimes pretend to look for long enough. If the painting is on your wall, you see it for a few seconds in the morning or at night and that's only maybe thirty seconds in a week say so about two minutes in a month. It’s less than thirty minutes a year. At first it seems like the painting relates to a topic, but then the subjects change. After three or four years a good painting becomes interesting. After subjects have come and gone, the painting starts to relate to things you can’t address directly, private decisions you might consider briefly in the morning or at night. Things like relationships or decisions you turn over in your heart. What’s left on your wall is a surface and at that point, you either get this feeling that the surface is empty or else the painting holds up. The painting is “good,” this distinction...I guess the subject, is about values.

AB: goodness, you mean.

AW: Yeah.

AB: The monochromes and the frescos look very different in person.

AW: --than they do in a photograph?

AB: Yes in a room they’re very warm and open. They change the room.

AW: I mean, what you see in a photograph is a symbol.

AB: Let’s talk about your relationship to words...

AW Okay sure.

AB I know you paint late at night and very early in the morning. When do you write?