Alan: I like to wander the streets in Rome. I enter churches and museums to see what treasures they have. I like the particular atmosphere that is visual as well as about sounds and sometimes smells. The churches can have the silence I tend to feel most comfortable in and may have the scent of incense and candles. They are often only dimly lit from high windows. Their sculptures and paintings can have mysterious qualities, being about people and stories I may not know. Fragments of ancient architecture and sculpture are embedded in the walls of buildings where they may have been found during renovations. Pieces of Latin inscriptions carved in marble no longer able to spell out whole words are beautiful for what those bits and pieces can be as fragments of things that had their own stories that we can’t know. I like tools and think about the men who used them to shape stone and wood and clay. In Rome, when the sky turns slate gray and then the sun pokes through the clouds and lights the earth yellows and reds of buildings against that dark gray, Rome is like no other city. I like how there is a different sense of order and design in the way products are displayed in stores. I like that a bar is not the dark and somber American bar partly lit by colored neon signs. It is where people have their coffee and pastry to start the day. I love the incongruity of things situated in streets and piazzas for no obvious reason. A few blocks from Piazza di Spagna, on Via del Babuino, there is an ancient grotesque Silenus, the mythological half man, half goat, old satyr god of drunkenness. To me, that strangely ugly figure of an old man reclining on rocks that feed water into a rectangular basin oddly situated on a fairly narrow street in the center of Rome is just one of those unexplained strangenesses in a city that has so many stories and so many mysteries. What inspires me most in Rome as a painter might be the Caravaggios and the works of the Italian painters made between the wars, and the city itself and its secrets.