I revisited an old friend for my latest painting. The Jane West doll first showed up in my studio a few years ago, and I had a feeling she wasn't done telling me things. Jane was manufactured in 1966 as part of the Best of the West toy line, and marketed as an action figure rather than a fashion doll like Barbie. Instead of purses and stilettos, she came with a holster for her pistol and spurs that buckled over a pair of cowboy boots molded permanently onto her feet. With her branding iron,...

Starting a new painting is a bit like setting off on an adventure. I don’t know where the journey will take me, but I feel pulled toward a place where symbols, textures, shapes, light, and color might reveal something unexpected. Few paintings have embodied that sense of discovery more fully than my latest work, The quest (shown below). Like every still life I paint, I rely on intuition rather than rationality to tap into an inner world where ideas emerge through the symbolism of the objects...

It might as well have been the holy grail. That's how excited I was to find the dusty anatomical heart model in a junk store just west of Nashville last year. There was no price on it, so I tried hard not to let the guy behind the counter know how much I wanted it. I got it for less than five bucks and ran out of the store before he could change his mind. The model is a little plastic gem of an object. Packed with symbolism associated with the emotional side of being human, a heart can mean a...