Christine Hughes interviews painter Ellen E. Rand on the occasion of Rand's recent exhibition at Figureworks, Brooklyn.

Rand comments: "Years ago, when I was at the Met, I saw a Manet painting of a sailor in a boat with one or two women. I like to read some of the information about a painting – when, where, who the artist knew, but the card next to the painting said that the artist painted out the original placement of the rope and put it in a different place because the 'dynamics of the diagonals of the expressions of…' and on and on. I thought, no! He painted it out because he didn’t like the way it looked! I do feel that an awful lot of art now is just an illustration of a thought or an idea, not something that comes from inside."