As I thought about which books are most important to me and my development as an artist, it gradually dawned on me that it would not be a reading list.

Virtually every artist, from the time of cave painting to the dawn of non-objective art, will tell you they paint what they see. Painting what you see seems like the most obvious and simplest thing in the world…until you try to do it.

There are some paintings I have thought about a lot and with which I have long relationships. The recently rediscovered Velázquez Portrait of a Man at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of them.