Like busmen, critics often have job-related holidays, leisure time activities that feed into, spill over from — and, with luck, provide respite from — more diligent pursuits in their areas of expertise. One of mine comes remarkably close. In summer I like to browse yard sales, thrift shops and, lately, flea markets, looking for paintings that speak to me. If the price is right (it usually is), I buy them and take them home.


This relatively relaxed form of art viewing often bears out something a friend told me Picasso once said: that any painting contains something worth looking at. From my experience, this may be a somewhat optimistic assessment, but ferreting out the worthy bits in anonymous paintings is great and often instructive fun. And the idea that every time someone applies malleable color to a small rectangular surface, there will be at least one revealing point of contact is cause for optimism. In the same way, I suppose, many poems written by amateurs have one memorable phrase or metaphor.


I was initiated into this pleasurable form of looking and getting by my husband, who is also an art critic, although I was already inclined toward it by my interest in outsider art. We’ve been together 26 years, and the paintings are beginning to mount up. Sometimes I think we’re running a kind of rescue mission.


Our early acquisitions were occasional and random, made mostly during the summer at yard and house sales on eastern Long Island and then in northwest Connecticut, near our summer rentals. There were infrequent finds on trips, like an amazing pencil and pastel drawing of a busy blacksmith’s shop that my husband bought from a street vendor in Rome, or a painting of a ship and an iceberg on an aqua sea that he got, after some bargaining, for the relatively astronomical price of $80 in Kansas City, Mo., while my two brothers looked askance (a frequent expression in my family).


We once spotted a largish winter scene while speeding along Route 17 in upstate New York. It was leaning against a pile of stuff in front of a junk shop. Its white snow and house and stark black trees jumped out, and we skidded to a stop.


This summer we pursued the flea market option to the exclusion of all others, making regular visits to a weekly confab in southwestern Connecticut, where we got some wonderful things, and also some less wonderful ones, for prices from $5 to $35. As with art fairs, the concentration of sellers has its benefits.


The hunt, as they always say, is half the fun. A way to exercise the eye in an after-hours, unstressed way. No deadlines involved (at least not until this series came along). We usually split up, since we cover more ground that way, and either buy on our own or, when we’re not sure, meet to consult. I move faster because I look at almost nothing but paintings. My husband is more thorough, which means that we also end up with the odd object — for example, an old guillotine-style mouse trap that accommodates four victims.


The flea-market experience is akin to snorkeling. You drift about, looking this way and that, waiting for something to catch your eye. Then you swim closer, zeroing in for a better look to see if the rest of what you saw rises to occasion of the part that initially attracted your attention. Sometimes the whole thing gels; sometimes the interesting part carries the whole thing. Sometimes it un-gels once you get it home, which is why we have something of a Salon des Refusés in the basement of our current rental.


All but a few of our finds are on Masonite or cheap canvas board; obviously making a painting is easier than stretching canvas. The subjects of the works we end up gravitating to are fairly traditional, which is to say that abstractions are infrequent, and we haven’t come across any that we couldn’t live without. (I think there might be more abstract art on eBay, but we’re not going there.) Instead we have lots of landscapes with or without animals, bodies of water or rustic architecture; a few still lifes; and several examples of what seems to be a popular still-life subcategory: unanchored, free-floating flowers. Figures are rare for us. Inconsistencies of space are frequent and usually a source of wonderful visual tension and contradiction.