Jay DeFeo, Landscape with Figure, 1955

Fred Martin: My name is Fred Martin, and I knew Jay DeFeo from when we were students at Berkeley, in 1948-49. Jay and I kept in touch with each other . . . in a way, forever, including even now.

I used to bring museum curators, and critics, and dealers, and collectors to meet Jay and her husband, Wally Hedrick, and that was often there. I liked it a lot, so I traded one of my paintings with Jay for that painting, in its frame.

I never thought of it as Landscape with Figure. I don't care what it says on the back. To me, it's a bowl of flowers.

Most of the time it was in storage here or there, sometimes on the wall, sometimes not. Sometimes I didn't know where it was, other times I did. Remember us artists, we flop around a lot. We don't treat our friends' work as museum masterpieces. We just treat them as things we like.