In Self-Portrait on Bed, made in 1973-74, Gregory Gillespie paints himself as a not-quite young man, some years older than I am as I write this. He sits on a mattress that sags toward the floor.

I recently visited Robert Gober’s The Heart is Not a Metaphor at the MoMA, and at the core of the exhibition was a dark room with Gober’s Slides of a Changing Painting.

“Okay, go ahead and look all you want, but it's going to be unpleasant for both of us.” - Lisa Yuskavage in an interview with Mónica de la Torre in Bomb magazine[i]

Bridget Riley described the experience of viewing her paintings as an “active, vibrating, pleasure,"[i] and was surprised and annoyed that others considered her work painful to look at.

In my memory the painting is titled, “Me and Joe.” It is small, maybe ten by fourteen inches. I am looking at the painting from behind the backs of several classmates who stand clustered around it.

It was a Lord of the Flies summer. I was coming from an undergraduate art program that served only to nurture the special seed...

A hot/cold interior, a crimson stage in the middle of a veiled blue vault, one lone, naked lady, tiny in scale but lit up—the lightest thing in the room-- presiding over a vast and louche lounge.

At the time the existence of this intelligent, vivacious woman painter was as inspiring and important to me as the paintings themselves.

It is a quiet painting, although we can hear the voices of women calling to each other as they work, the sound of a news announcer on the radio, or a song, perhaps a finch in its cage singing, and the background throb of a pigeon from the rooftop.