Sean Landers toldthis publication that the clown series began with a single painting he made in 1996,Alone, which featured a solitary clown adrift in a rowboat, with a painted frown not quite disguising his alarm at the rough seas. Alone recast Landers’s wit and intermittent despair in quiet desperation. “It is,” he said, “the exact point in my work where the stream-of-consciousness text was handed off to pure image painting.” . . .