This is the story of an American painter. The details of his life are vague. We can make inferences about his interests from his still life paintings. Each one draws heavily from the legacy of Modernist abstraction, but they are all fully representational paintings. We also glean clues about his interests in American culture from his statement, his letters and his poems. The letters are divided into a small collection of letters he received in the 1940s while still living in Europe, and other letters that he wrote after moving to the American midwest in the 1960s. One of the late letters refers to a fictional character he invented named Matthew Girson who says, “Sometimes we wrap ourselves up in the warmth of the stories we’ve inherited. At other times we spin, weave, and create our own stories. Sometimes our stories fray and tear. None of these are pure and I prefer none over any other.”