New York Close Up series featured artist Josephine Halvorson created a limited edition tote bag, offered here as a gift to Art21 members. Join or renew your membership today to receive this exclusive benefit.

Josephine Halvorson was born in 1981 in Brewster, Massachusetts, formerly worked in New York, and currently lives and works in Western Massachusetts. Combining acute attention to detail and an insistence on painting from life, Halvorson gives herself only one day to complete each canvas.

Traveling outside of New York to paint, she works onsite, often selecting scenes that convey a sense of postindustrial grit. Her subjects range from a patch of missing paint on a wall to doors, windows, and other architectural details, but she acknowledges that “anything in the world could be a painting.” Interested in her relationship to the subjects of her paintings, Halvorson resists the term painter; she prefers to think of painting as recording time spent with an object in its environment.