The story behind Joe Andoe’s wide and flat fields, horses and naked teenaged girls is the final subject of Radiolab’s episode on Memory, which is one of their best shows. Andoe believes these images keep materializing on his canvases because of some kind of post-pleasure syndrome - the same aftermath as PTSD, but instead of a catastrophe, the repeat button gets stuck on a moment of intense pleasure.
It’s a memory that makes you feel drunk, especially the way he tells it: Joe, in love for the first time with this girl, Kay - now repeating herself in the figures he paints like Renoir’s ever-present lady with the pink lips, flipped nose and oval face - who is naked in his 1967 Nova, in the middle of an Oklahoma pasture, looks up to see a horse staring through the window. It gets better.