I’ve never before seen it. A huge oil, done in blacks and whites, and subtlest pinkish-grays. At once, of course, I know the artist. My sinuses burn. For a moment, part of me wants to bolt from here; another longs to turn toward those audibly revolving doors, expecting a two-part appointment made years ago.

Schoolgirls in gray pleated skirts and blue blazers cluster before the huge canvas. They bunch around their lady teacher, who is pointing out one portion of it—careful not to make actual contact with the valuable surface.

I fold my newspaper and, feeling a strange kind of hunter’s excitement, almost a nausea of attention, rise. I approach the painting, but slow, as if stalking the rarest of game. It might move. It might leap away, achieve the street, run straight for woods.

I feel atypically tall, somewhat wobbly, older than seems possible, thicker at my palpitating center. And yet I somehow make my Airedale way across this crowded public civic space. I keep my head down, fearful that, if I confront my goal too directly, someone, something, might push me back from it.

A fear comes: I will die before I get to it.

But no, you don’t even need a ticket to see this one. It’s the “teaser” that they stick in front of sideshows. Surefire bait to draw you in. I slide through conversations in three languages I can identify but not speak.

Its underpainting has a snapping and splashed energy. Raw X’s form the basic grid. These marks have been set down with an enviable sense of brushy freedom. Paint was trusted to do what it must at this impossible speed.

Hidden among the darks, stenciled digits, letters resting on their sides, paint scraped very thick, runes arranged—it seems—with a sort of archaic grandeur. Since the picture stretches six by nine feet, you feel that any artist who could manage so long a reach must be someone of immense physical scale.

Set overtop this whorl and slap, a frame of draperies, rendered as if around some puppet stage, valance swags around the picture’s entire top. Within curtains, susceptible to blackness underneath—a faint pink over-sketch shows a cottage, grayish rose. It has shutters, an opened half door, thatched roof, hollyhocks and azaleas standing sentinel, drifts of sea foam. This home seems the witch’s, as overly inviting as one in some fairy tale that is all violent twists. The kitschy sketch, though done with much ironic haste, still seems full of longing. There’s something childlike in its false cheer, the pathos of promised shelter.

Up and down either six-foot end, words show through the paint. First these look like accidental squiggles, until, closer, you see they’re sentences; each has been speckled with paint so as to at first seem hidden.

But I just saw two schoolgirls cock their heads, deciphering the flanking statements. One, to the right, offers the promise of fond slavery, a hope for free meals ahead; the left one threatens the artist’s very hands, promises the artist will soon suffer terribly and never paint again.