Dan Weiskopf interviews painter Ben Steele, whose exhibition From this, a Mountain is on view at {poem:88}, Atlanta, through May 24, 2014.

Steele comments: "I’ve never been an artist working from my imagination in terms of just saying, 'I’m going to decide to put this here.' Someone might say, well, if you want to put a red stripe in your painting, just do it. No. The way I do it is to go into my installation room, paint a huge red stripe, and then make that part of a scene so I can remind myself that it was initially on a surface in light and space before appearing on canvas. That’s how I would go about painting a red stripe… The unifying theme in my {Poem 88} show… is mountain imagery—generally speaking landscapes with clear slopes and a glimpse of sky, so you have this enclosed infinite space. So it’s about seeing the landscape and being pulled back into a larger space. At the same time you can recognize that this deep space is existing within a shallower space and is ultimately quite flat. I see this experience as quite like experiencing painting, which combines spatial illusion and surface. You’re painting on the surface and everything is an illusion. The projections play the role of image in the work, which ultimately is a physical surface. It’s almost like an accordion going in and out."