Matthew Harrison Tedford interviews painter John Zurier on the occasion of his exhibition Matrix 255 at the Berkeley Art Museum, on view through December 21, 2014.

Asked about the "idea of you working in a landscape rather than depicting the landscape," Zurier comments: "For me, you experience nature whole. It just comes to you. With the landscape, the things you can’t reproduce are what are interesting to me. You’re dealing with these forces and energies and then try and make a painting that’s an equivalent of that. That’s what I mean about painting in the landscape… I didn’t go to Iceland searching for unsentimental sense of solitude, but I certainly found that when I was there. I think that’s one of the things about landscape. When you see landscapes of Iceland it’s usually spectacular. It’s usually these amazing waterfalls and amazing glaciers, and I’m not really interested in that kind of picturesque quality. Up in Skagafjörður [in the north of Iceland] it’s softer, it’s different."