It is a good time for painting. I have recently returned from a year spent at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn. This was a marvelous year spent painting in the studio and wandering the city looking at art, visiting artists, and writing about art. Abstract painting thrives on intelligent mark making, but there needs to be something else. Good questions need to be asked. The best of painting now lives because of good questions. I am asking about conceptual intention and painterly intuition.