I am always amazed in the Orsay by the Surrealists. I love their feel of otherworldliness that is so different from my own art. I keep thinking about their distinctive visual vocabulary (Redon with his floating flowers, Van Gogh’s portrait with the stars behind it), and I would love to achieve that feel in my own work without knowing exactly how to do it that doesn’t feel completely derivative. I saw an Andrew Wyeth exhibition recently, and he’s such a hardcore realist, but he had one amazing landscape with feathers floating across the picture plane in the foreground. It was perfect for who he was as a painter. As I’ve been looking at these details, I’m daydreaming about using them in conjunction with figures. I did the first self portrait on the right, and (aside from the deer in the headlights look — faces are still hard for me), it had something of that Medieval sense of pattern and symbolic space that I was hoping for. The second has more realistic space in it, but with the added Art Deco details I sketched on various buildings. I’m going to keep playing with this for a bit and see what happens.