A studio is full of fabulous still life objects which she sets up outside or in for workshops in oil or for demonstration paintings provides the subject matter. Torgesen has very strong feelings about the importance of painting from life where all the decisions must be made by the artist. The life blood of still life painting is to make color sing by using cools against warms and thick brush strokes against thin ones. It is an illusion to believe reality can be copied per se. It is all a matter of what and how one chooses to see that can transform an otherwise ordinary painting into a transcendent experience. I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter because of flowers.” Claude Monet