Larry Groff interviews painter Frank Hobbs about his work and career.

Asked about the excitement of plein air painting, Hobbs remarks: "On site, the first things that I respond to are space and light. I really am an abstract painter, I think; or a frustrated musician. Rhythm is more important to me than the particular inventory of things. I love to discover how things connect visually; to find the 'liasons' between things, to borrow Lennart Anderson’s term. A searching attitude is important because it allows for the emergence of something new, a transformation of the familiar fragmented reality into something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. A great painting is not just a picture, it’s really a model of how the universe is put together: one energy differentiated into all these seemingly disparate, yet dependent, parts. You see it in Morandi’s table top games, in Corot’s oil studies, and especially in Vuillard’s interiors from the 1890s. Could anything be more thrilling than to make a 14 x 18-inch model of the universe?"