When one goes to a couple of dozen gallery shows a week, as I have been doing over the past months, the rush of images and the effort to adjust one’s eyes and mind to very different kinds of art can be overwhelming. Sometimes I’m not sure I’m actually responding to the work and suspect my general mood is getting in the way of what I see in front of me. Some days all sorts of things look good; other days, when the first few shows are a downer, I start to approach everything skeptically. Often I leave a gallery feeling uncertain about what I’ve seen, and in these cases I find that one of the most useful tests is whether the work holds in my mind’s eye. Some art feels intriguing when I’m in front of it, but ten minutes after I leave the gallery it’s gone from my mind—I can barely recall what it looked like. Other shows—like the exhibition of new sculpture by William Tucker at the David McKee Gallery (which was reviewed in this magazine last month)—make me feel uneasy when I’m in the gallery, but stay with me afterwards. The shows I remember and play over three hours or three days after I’ve seen them are the ones I’m interested in. They’re the shows that make me feel I’ve been opened up to a new experience. What follows are impressions of three recent painting shows that have stayed with me—and of one show, the