"Down in the Valley" seemed to me to be a song about spatial relationships, particularly about the connections between the individual's emotional landscape and the physical space they inhabit. I feel that in the process of painting abstractions, the artist can make these emotional spaces visible to others, and by articulating or delineating these spaces, they become more real and begin to take on more weight. I find that music and writing also have this quality; I believe this is why such forms of expression are (and have always been) so imperative for people. The process of painting serves a similar purpose for me as songs like "Down in the Valley" served for those who wrote and passed them along.

In my own painting, especially where I deal with emotion, color is the driving force. When I first listened to the song, I tried to gauge my response to the melody and the lyrics in terms of a color idea. Once I had identified the colors I wanted to work with, (the colors I "felt" or heard in the song), I then set to work carving out the emotional landscape, for lack of a more nuanced term, of the painting. I use the term landscape because of the pronounced spatial elements of the composition, but the term for all its usefulness is reductive--my work and I think all work always has elements of self-portraiture by virtue of the simple fact that the artist made it and therefore is somehow depicted within it, whether intentionally or not. This particular piece has further elements of portraiture because it is a portrait of the song itself, and of the people behind the lyrics and the melody, and the people behind the voices in the recordings. But bringing it back to the idea of landscape, I think this paintings has strong elements of landscape because it is a portrait of a song that I think has a powerful connection to landscape. Since I was focusing on the idea of the valley, I was thinking about natural processes like erosion, rivers changing course, things like that. Now that I've had a chance to step back from my work, it's easier for me to interpret visual clues that were more visceral or intuitive at the time I was painting, and I can see that my response to the song had a lot to do with water. I think the feeling I got from the song and the subsequent landscape that I envisioned was one part water, two parts earth, because I instinctively used ultramarine and raw umber, the colors I chose, in about that ratio. There does seem to be an earthy quality to the song, at least the lyrics seem to be concerned with earth to me, the images of the valley, the jail, the roses and violets, but the feeling of the song overall was water, mourning, loneliness. There is also a sense of motion and change, of the wind blowing through the valley, which could correspond to the sort of white "squiggle" (?) that cuts through the painting. I think I initially read my own work as a landscape that stretches out in front of the viewer, but looking at it now I guess it could also be an aerial view. That's one of the more interesting qualities of my work, I think: the fact that even I don't ever fully know what it means. Working intuitively means that I don't always have a clear agenda in mind, or maybe I do but I don't know what it is, and so I have to work backwards from looking at what I made to figure out what I was thinking. When I was making this piece I wasn't really thinking about any of this stuff, at least not consciously, but now that I'm reexamining it I can locate more of the complexities behind what I was doing with the paint. That's one of those transferrable lessons that I learned from painting, that you miss a lot of stuff in the moment. It's only in retrospect that you unearth the really good shit.