When Walter Price was growing up in Macon, Ga., he would sometimes wake before sunrise to join his mother on the porch and watch the day begin. It was a habit that the self-described early bird reinforced during the four years he spent in the Navy, before attending art school on the G.I. Bill and later moving to New York. Today, the 31-year-old’s ultra-disciplined art-making ritual involves rising before 5 a.m. to stretch, exercise and draw. Price’s first show opens this week at Greene Naftali and features paintings and drawings of images that, like your first thought of the day, hover between dream and waking observation. In his modestly sized acrylic paintings, abstracted landscapes and domestic scenes are overlaid with sketchy graphite lines, floating shapes, pasted-in photographs and inscrutable phrases. In one work from 2019, “It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at,” lightly sketched human figures pass between cars, holding umbrellas aloft; the sky is a bruised chartreuse, rain clouds daubed on in a thick, gluey gray. In another canvas from 2018, a crimson sun in a fuchsia sky burns down on a red convertible and field of bright blue palm trees. It all stems from the artist’s obsession with color and line. As he said in 2018, “I tend to try to take all the basic fundamental elements of art and create a very funky painting.”