Robert Reitzfeld (b. 1938) grew up poor in the Bronx in the 1940s. The closest thing to art he encountered as a child was in the work of cartoonists — newspaper strips and comic books, the vernacular visual language of working-class American life. He never forgot it, and never saw any reason to. As his education deepened and his engagement with art history broadened, that early love of the comic and admiration for the cartoonist did not diminish — it became foundational. Elements from comics appear throughout his paintings, not as irony or quotation but as genuine affection, a refusal to separate the sophisticated from the popular, the gallery from the street corner where he first learned to look. Reitzfeld has been painting full time since the early 1990s. He studied and taught at the School of Visual Arts on and off from 1965 to 2012, and served on the boards of Creative Time for ten years and the Streb Dance Company for twenty-eight — a record of commitment to the institutions that sustain artistic life in New York that is as much a part of his practice as anything made in the studio. His work has been exhibited in New York, Hudson, Connecticut, California, and Berlin. After years of living and working in New York, he relocated to Connecticut — a move that has given him the space and freedom to make the most ambitious work of his practice.