When I was 18, I didn’t want to leave my hometown for college. I just loved it there, flawed as it was, a limping industrial town in west Michigan, it’s most vibrant years three decades past. I just loved it there, so much.

When I was 22, I could have stayed in Ann Arbor, my college town, forever. Not that my college years were so great, but I loved the town. The place grew on me.

I loved my neighborhoods in every city I’ve ever lived in. I love it here now in Brooklyn, walking down the sidewalks of Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens, what we consider our extended neighborhood.

Why do I love it so much, where I am? Why do I connect? I have a theory (beyond being catlike): I don’t drive. Walking, biking: this is how I get to know a neighborhood, a town, a city. And to know it is to love it, like Phil Spector sort of said. To know a place, you’ve got to get your boots (or bike tires) on the ground. The slower you go, the fewer barriers are between you and your surroundings, the better you get to know a place. And like I said, to know it is to love it.

This is why I do location-specific art, I suppose. I notice little things around me that are lovely, and I want to record the places I love. I take pictures. I draw. I paint. It makes me feel right. That’s about it.