Jean Seberg starred in Breathless and St. Joan (about Joan of Arc), among many other films. Her boyishly short trademark hair fit the part, but did little to efface her irrepressible femininity. She embodied a post-war American sexuality of naive jouissance, virtuous but suggestively permissive.

Jamie Adams restages her unabashedly into his American boyhood dream. That little cowboy of Benton-esque flourishes is him, so palpably eager to draw the blossomed vixen, you can hear the whisle blow. He renders all this gee-whiz naughtiness in a virtuoso grisaille of surprising light-infused sensuosity—or rather, through the unblinking crispness of black and white. Each of Jamie Adams’ masterful oil paintings in his exhibition Jeannie is a fully realized filmic moment that ties the artist to his muse in the most engagingly problematic way.