Art critic and poet Barry Schwabsky speaks about ideas relevant to painting today with specific examples from Victoria Gitman: Desiring Eye.For a long time now, painting has been more concerned with the image rather than with representation--that is, with its own construction rather than the construction of resemblances to the observed world. Lately, however, a number of younger painters--Victoria Gitman among them--have rediscovered the observation and transcription of appearances as a powerful resource for painting, and they are doing so without giving up the self-reflectiveness, intellectual lucidity, and emotional content the art gained through a century of cubism, expressionism, abstraction and so on.