Sebastian Smee reviews a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Jon Imber at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, New York, on view through June 15, 2013.

Smee writes that Imber's paintings "have an unusually insistent pull — you feel something vital at stake…Imber has wrestled with different influences, different styles, and different subject matter all his life. The shifts, in his case, have felt less tectonic than nimble, supple, full of yearning and mischief. Life, in Imber’s paintings, unfurls with wayward force, like a thick, flicked rope. It takes on vital cadences. It laughs at itself, too."