I’m quoting here from an interesting article in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik about highly processed food. Gopnik is writing about the relative dangers of eating highly processed food and the difference between that and the more natural processes of preserving food. He writes, “ As to the niceties of nature and art, the processed and the preserved? Shakespeare, as so often, saw the problem first and says it best. In “The Winter’s Tale,” he has the wise Polixenes instruct the beautiful shepherdess Perdita, who refused to include cultivated flowers in her bouquets, that ‘Nature is made better by no mean, but nature makes that mean/So over that art which you say adds to nature, is an art that nature makes.’” This, I think gets at the heart of what I’m exploring with my paintings.