Valerie Brennan interviews painter Rick Briggs.

Briggs comments: "Basically, I'm always working out of personal need and want my work to reflect my life. This has been true of my abstract work as well as the representational work. Previously with the Painter Man series, I worked in a narrative way because I needed to tell a story. Once I told that story, the need to make explicitly narrative work went away. Gradually I returned full circle to my first love of abstract painting. The newer work draws on my long histories with both abstraction and commercial painting. A painting can begin anywhere and end anywhere. For example, a painting could begin or end with the application of the round paint skein that forms in the can of the alkyd house paint that I use. I can do a large painting in a day and I just recently finished one that took 2 years to complete, so it's always different and it's that lack of a system that fascinates me. My process asks a lot – both of me and the viewer."