“Sunday Forno... is my newest painting in this group. ‘Forno’ is Italian for oven: it’s a place where you insert raw material, fire it, and cook it, and I was thinking about this in relation to the way I make my paintings. There’s a repeated image of a sculptural head that appears to be smashed or fragmented, and images of bowls. These are consumed by red Cy Twombly-like scribble which I think of as fire. The flame forms come from the idea of the oven. I like how it relates to surrealist and metaphysical paintings where fire is used symbolically. In this painting, the blue and black scribbled lines have a function: they’re like painting tropes or tendencies, and I use them to bridge classic painting with everyday graphics. These lines hit a lyrical or expressive note in Sunday Forno... it looks like smoke, but also steam coming off the motifs. That’s the main inspiration for this work: a motif ready to put in the oven, to use or distribute, to give off steam.”