At Pen and Brush, painter Katherine Bradford met with Deborah Buck to walk through Buck’s exhibition “New Jewels,” which opens with a suite of crowned, open-mouthed, defiant women the artist calls her “bad girls.” Many of these paintings cost Buck her dealers in the 1980s and spent some forty years in storage before this show. Buck traces what shaped her, from a childhood on a Maryland farm and a teenage mentorship with Clyfford Still to a Skowhegan scholarship at seventeen. Along the way, the two painters talk about engagement rings, beauty pageants, film noir, and how Buck’s portraits reveal who they are only as she paints them. Here are excerpts from their conversation.