John Seed interviews painter April Gornik on the occasion of her exhibition Recent Paintings and Drawings at Danese/Corey, New York, on view through May 31, 2014.

Gornik comments: "Paintings to me are machines that generate emotion, thought, and real experience through what's been embedded there by the artist. If a person is inured to that from image overkill, they'll just see a painting as an image and not go into the hand within the work. It's a loss I'm trying to push against… I like to think of the paintings as having the potential to generate different emotions in different people. I hope I build them well enough to do that, so that someone might feel a soaring, happy feeling looking at, say, Radiant Light and someone else might feel a kind of vertigo and uneasiness at the way it shifts in front of you. Landscape for me is a complicated attempt to locate myself in the world spiritually and emotionally and there's never one single feeling I have looking at something that feels true — as opposed to real — although many people just see that they're 'realistic.' "