Howard Kaplan blogs about Michael Goldberg’s painting Sardines (1955), the inspiration for Frank O’Hara’s poem Why I Am Not a Painter, which documents the painting’s progress.

Kaplan writes: “O’Hara was a very generous friend. He was particularly giving to his painter friends, including Goldberg, in looking at their work and responding to it. Joe LeSueur in his invaluable Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O’Hara states that O’Hara offered his painter friends ‘encouragement, inspired them with his insights and his passion; they impinged upon and entered his poetry, which would not have been the same and probably not as good without them.’ One can say in turn that the painters he knew and cultivated would not possibly have achieved all they did without O’Hara’s enthusiasm and feedback.”