When I came upon this scene, I was taken by the dramatic relation of two couples showing very different attitudes: one embracing, the other apart and seeming to question each other. Yet with all their difference I felt they were related and wanted them both in the same picture frame, joined through the make-shift seat.

I saw this as a comment on how two people can be close without wholly knowing each other, and then get angry because of their disappointment. Then, in an Aesthetic Realism class that included a discussion of this photograph, I saw something new about it--something I've come to see as central. Class Chairman Ellen Reiss said she saw these two couples as really aspects of each other: “Two people can be in an embrace, but somewhere each is looking at the other and saying ‘Who are you?’ ‘How do you see?’ ‘Is it the same way I see?’” These questions enabled me to see why this scene had affected me so deeply some twenty years earlier.

As a husband, I've learned from Aesthetic Realism that love is always a mingling of care and questioning. We are, every moment, a drama of closeness and separation, and we want those opposites to make sense.

To understand what impels us as an artist is a rare and precious thing, and the study of Aesthetic Realism makes this understanding possible, for which I'm very grateful.