This painting belongs to a series of work Deborah Kass began in the aftermath of the contentious Presidential election in 2000, as well as the ensuing terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 and resultant War on Terror. Kass deployed nostalgia as a potent aesthetic device in these works.. Titled feel good paintings for feel bad times, the series drew liberally from various Post War 20th Century aesthetic positions, especially those of Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha. Using their vibrant, optimistic formalism as a structure on which to embed hopeful lyrics from Broadway, Pop Music, film scores, Yiddish traditions, and the Great American Song Book, Kass created electric visual mash-ups that inspire reflection on the differences between the contemporary artistic, political and cultural zeitgeist and that of the period following World War II.

This work takes as its inspiration the Jasper Johns: Painting with Two Balls from 1960—a painting that actually has two balls inserted into a slash in the canvas. Johns also made a number of studies, prints and other works on paper based on the painting. Several of them, such as the one in the National Gallery of Art, are presented in a black/white/grey palette. In her painting, Deborah Kass appropriates that specific color palette, while also appropriating Jasper Johns' distinctive brush stroke style, and his use of repeating symbols, such as words, letters and numbers. In her painting, Kass repeats the word COJONES, a Spanish word for balls (as in courage), which also itself contains two Os. Kass is known for inserting herself into the art historical canon through clever use of appropriation. Without directly copying Johns, she references his work brilliantly in this painting, resulting in a killer work that is as much an homage to an artist she respects as a cutting criticism of an art world system that left artists such as herself (queer, Jewish women) out of the conversation during the 1960s and 70s when Johns was making this series.