Larry Groff interviews painter Israel Hershberg. The interview detailing Hershberg's history and experience as a painter is richly illustrated with a number of his still life and landscape paintings. Theis fascinating, extensive interview, transcribed from Skype, touches on a variety of issues.

Some excerpts:

Hershberg: "It all boiled down to exploration and pictorial curiosity for me — based on the notion that painting is in any case in its essence an abstraction. But no question, I am hopelessly seduced by the idea of jamming or processing what I perceive in the concrete world through that mechanism. I have no interest in the ‘narrative of narratives’ per se or in creating any kind of document. The conviction that painting is the expression of the experience of painting is more potent and urgent then ever."

Hershberg: "We live in a very diminished world visually. We’re being conditioned by all sorts of images: photographs, computer generated images you know, media. When reared on this, there’s little question: by the time a youngster makes it to the museum, if ever, and sets his eyes on Velazquez’s Las Meninas – I mean his eyes – it is highly doubtful he or she will have the necessary brain cells to see abundantly what that astounding work can hold out beyond the shallowness that the pixel dimensions their computer screen, mind you, a substantial improvement over offset reproduction, currently has."