Paint what you know.That’s what Connie Tartaglia’s art teacher preached all those years ago, when little Joey was still just walking, and she was taking a nighttime painting course while Joe Sr. was busy with the family fruit stands. So she did.

The view from their Ninth Street apartment window: the crush of a crowded fruit stand in the cold, with crates spilled across the cobblestone — the street was still cobblestone back then in the early ’70s — peddlers warming their hands in thick wool coats, customers pawing produce.