“She smelled of breath mints and tobacco smoke and wore a fixed ‘I can see right through you’ expression. What she saw was my radiant gay self.”

Jimmy Wright’s many collectors and enthusiasts quite reasonably think of him as a New York painter. Wright (b. 1944) has lived and worked in New York City since 1974, and since the early ’90s he has been celebrated for his incisive self-portraits and his luscious paintings and pastels of sunflowers. The New York Times described Wright’s sunflowers as “untrammeled images so deeply expressive that they make van Gogh’s florals look decorous by comparison,” and the New Yorker said they are “passionately unkempt . . . not exactly unsentimental, but full of a writhing, macabre lushness.”