Larry Groff interviews painter Eve Mansdorf.

Mansdorf comments: "I often want a tension between formal elements such as form, light, color and other elements that are more subjective and psychological. I guess the Freudian part is the psychological aspect of the painting. The Kantian part is the formal part… When you’re doing figure painting, one way is to paint the model as a kind of objectified form where the model sits and poses for you and you’re treating them a bit like a still life object. Once you move away from that and become concerned with creating activity in the painting, a social world, a contextual space, a psychological tension develops in the painting. It is inevitable in some ways and, as the painter, you have to manage the dynamic that is coming into being. You are starting to create artifice. Some people call this narrative. Many observational painters are uncomfortable making that leap–they feel it is dishonest somehow. I am not interested in a really overt narrative. I find it too confining. But I am interested in creating metaphors and relationships between things that are not simply formal."