Ross Simonini interviews painter Chris Martin whose work is currently on view at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles through November 09, 2013.

Martin comments: "I think the great masters are people like de Kooning, who consistently opened his formal vocabulary to include every kind of idea—it was a shoulder, or it was a breast, or a light on the grass, or it was water, and it was about looking at the sidewalk. It’s what he called slipping glimpses—where something gives you that kind of shiver, and you see that it is the light on the sidewalk and it’s the water rippling at Amsterdam and it’s the little song your mother used to sing you. It all could be in there. Pure, abstract painting doesn’t exist. And even if it did exist, who would want that? Not me."