“I am doing a sort of retrospective on the last 12 years of painting by looking at abstraction in my work … to look at the term,” said Joe McGee. “Just what does abstraction mean today?” Good question with no quick answer, especially since the labels abstract and nonrepresentational seem to be used broadly today by the visual art community. McGee has made the quest personal by reexamining his mixed-media paintings from 2004-2016, especially “La Vida y El Muerte (Living Mountain and Dying Mountain).” The process is a bit like combining reading a diary with scholarly research.