As a child during my summers at the beach, I spent many hours contemplating the ocean; watching the color change from gray to azure blue, and the surface from turbulent to the flatness of a polished mirror. This time of observation felt purposeful, as though, if I sat long enough I could penetrate its meaning or more accurately, its being. How the ocean looked attached itself to a mood and an atmosphere.  It felt as though it had meaning apropos of nothing. How something looked was important.  It struck a deep chord in me.  The most "important" looks were the ones that I was least able to describe. I think that is why now I spend so much time trying to paint the un-paintable: hoar frost, silvery light, light reflected off of surfaces.

I come from a family that had copious amounts of china.  There was informal china and formal china, china for the beach house, salad plates, dessert plates, bread plates, luncheon plates and dinner plates. Cups with two handles for consume and cups with one handle for coffee, and demi-tasse cups and on and on. Despite having china for every possible occasion or combination of food, it was almost never used. It was considered too precious and belonging to someone else -- as much of it was inherited. In an effort to counter act that, at least once a year I pull out all the china and use it for a big party. In this case, I tend to try to make the food match the china, rather than visa verse. I have not mastered a tomato aspic, although the china is screaming out for it.

One year, after the party and before I put away the dishes I decided to pile the plates on a table and make a still life out of it. I had been painting piled up newspapers and recycled cans, this just seemed to be one more thing I could pile up. And, in deed, I didn't stop with the plates, but also added crysta

Yes, I really am painting garbage. I didn't set out to paint garbage. I didn't wake up one morning and say painting garbage would be a good thing to do. Instead, while walking near a friend's house in Sasebo, Japan, I passed the recycling center. In it they were moving bales of recycled paper to prepare them for transport. The image of their surface was striking to me, like a Harnett trompe l'oeil painting, and the structure of the bales made me think of Don Judd's boxes.

MK:  When you were a child did you go to museums?  Pay attention to the art in your home?

LP:   When I was very young I used to pour over my parents’ two art books. One was Fifty Centuries of Art from the Metropolitan Museum, and the other was a survey of American art. What I felt when looking through those books was that I wanted to live inside a painting. We lived just outside of New York City, and my mother took me to my first museum exhibition when I was nine or so. It was a retrospective of Turner at the Modern. I remember feeling when I walked through the rooms that I wanted to know everything about what I was seeing, but I wanted to get that information directly from the paintings. I was not one to read labels.

You know when there is a painter you really love, where everything about their work excites you and you go in the studio and spend all your time trying to avoid that person's work?