In honor of the life and art of David Byrd, the 87-year-old artist who came out of seclusion and became known to the world in April and then died last Thursday just days after his first-ever gallery exhibition sold more than 75 out of 100 paintings on display, we decided to run one of his paintings as the cover of this week's Stranger.

We picked the one above, with its funny title Man Undressing Shirt, which is linguistically as jumbled as the visual tangle of this man and his plain white T-shirt. Or is it a T-shirt? How is he getting it so wrong, and why is that opening so stretched open and taut? It looks like a birth.

The composition is a striking gathering of floating shapes: parallel diagonal lines of arm and shirt, topped off with the elbow triangle. Three echoing shaded spheres (two armholes and head). The arcing sweep up and over of the stretch of the fabric. Those stubs of fingers.

Aaron Huffman, art director of The Stranger, scrolled several times through every single Byrd image on the extensive Greg Kucera Gallery web site in order to choose one for the cover. Some of Byrd's paintings are charming, hearty 1930s-style scenes, but most were inspired by more harrowing stuff: Byrd's decades working as an orderly in the mental ward of a VA hospital in central New York.

In a phone conversation between the two floors of our office just now, Huffman described what drew him to Man Undressing Shirt:

It seems to be an interesting little everyday slice of life, just the everyday difficulty of this person getting into and out of their clothes. That simple image of just one person was really interesting to me, maybe more than some of his paintings with the multiple people in them.

Another one [I considered] was the man and the nurse, I think they were holding hands. I found those really simple ones to be the most interesting. I think there was another one, of a man unbuttoning his shirt or his cuffs or something, and it just being a hard task for him to do, this simple thing. I just thought that was kind of fascinating.

There are exceptions, Huffman says, but he generally looks for "something with one clear focus in the image... something you can stop on the street and look at and sort of recognize right away, but that is still intriguing, like you have to get a little closer to find out what's going on."

I've always found it pretty freaking great that The Stranger runs art on its cover, sometimes art by local artists that then papers the city right when the artist is having a show. Every week this newspaper reminds you to look at art by asking you to do that before you interact with anything we've written. I dig that. This week it just feels good to be able to have one of David Byrd's images out front, and it seems to me this one was a perfect cover for all the reasons Huffman singled out.

Sometimes people ask me why I don't write more—or sometimes at all—about the artists on our covers, and Huffman and I are talking about doing a Q&A between art director and art critic. We'd talk about: How does he pick covers, and how is it different from how I pick shows or works to review or write about? What does he think are some of the great covers of the past, and some of the most blah? Or what do you want to know? Leave any ideas and questions in the comments, and we'll see if there's enough interest to drum up a piece.

Want to submit art for a cover? Email Huffman.

Here's one more of those simple pictures Huffman was describing.