Frank Hobbs transcribes excerpts from a newly posted video on the painter Rackstraw Downes.

Hobbs quotes Downes: "When I… started painting from observation, one of the reasons was that I didn’t want to be so damn self-conscious about my paintings… Why not just look at something and paint it the way it is? Plop! And that’s what I did… People often say to me, why do you pick such banal subjects, and I don’t understand that at all. They don’t seem to me to be banal in the least. They’re full of magic."