Jennifer Samet talks with painter Kyle Staver about her work, Facebook debates, and late Renoir.

Staver remarks: "When I first started painting, with personal subject matter, I wanted to tell you what it was like to be alive, and to be Kyle Staver. I thought, I will paint about the most important events of my life, and hopefully, in doing that, will make a connection to you and it will be universal. Well, I did that for a long time. If you look at Titian, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, or Picasso, you see that at a certain point in their careers, they gave up personal incidents as subject matter, and turned to the mythological, because those themes are typical. We all share Adam and Eve — some sort of ideas about creation. So, rather than go from the particular and try to make it universal, I now am taking the universal and telling you about my stake in it."

Kyle Staver, Paintings, Prints, Reliefs is on view at John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York, through February 24, 2013.