John Seed interviews painter Lisa Breslow on the occasion of her exhibition at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, New York, on view through December 15, 2012.

Asked about balancing abstraction and representation in her work, Breslow comments: " I'm always searching for the perfect balance between the two. In creating the urban scenes, my photographs enable me to capture a specific moment in time, and serve as studies. The painting that follows is very much about a real place and a real environment. It is equally about paring the subject down to its visual essence, a visceral, intuitive process of working and reworking the surface and losing oneself in the paint. I constantly rotate the painting to free up my vision and open up fresh perspectives. When the painting speaks to me on both levels, I know it is complete."