On a residency in Maine at the MacNamara Foundation in 2003, I painted The Mistress and Her Donkey and Fresnel’s Boots. I’d thought the donkey painting would take all six weeks of my stay, but with ten hours a day to paint, and all cares taken care of, I finished in half the time. We’d been taken on the Foundation boat to an island with a lighthouse. We’d climbed up to the top, and I’d video-taped the cupola and lens, designed by a Frenchman named Fresnel. Over a period of a couple of days I reinvented the lighthouse, seen from an angle that only a bird would see, and then began painting it. It is rare for one of my pieces to have no figures in it, though the boots hint at the presence of a man.