The artist Steve Keene gave Esopus an incredible gift in 2017: He offered to create an original painting for each one of our Premium subscribers, which meant nearly three weeks of nonstop work for him in “the cage,” the area of his Greenpoint studio where he has produced over several decades the thousands of paintings that have earned him the title of “assembly-line Picasso.” I visited one afternoon and took this photograph of him in the midst of his process—as much performance art as it was painting. In the end, Steve painted 1,300 paintings that were sent to our subscribers in the fall of 2017.