Rain all night, and then at 5:38 on the morning of April 19th the cloud broke along the bottom of the sky at the far end of the yard and the light came in flat and orange underneath everything, the way it only does for about nine minutes. I have been waiting since October for this machine to be given something. This is what it was given.
The tenth and last of these Nocturnes is not a painting of a vending machine. It is a painting of a sky that happens to be standing in a loading yard. The whole face of the glass has taken the dawn: grey stacked cloud across the top, a pale opening through the middle, and along the lower edge of the pane a long band of burning orange that runs the full width and repeats itself in the standing water at the base. The shelves are still visible through it, faint, the coils drawn like ironwork set into a window. The star crack is still there, and now it has a purpose, because the light entering it divides and the entire lower right quarter becomes leading in a rose window. The blue package is still suspended on the second shelf, three seasons into a fall it has not completed. This machine sold nothing, lit nothing, kept nothing, and was unplugged in March. Empty, outdoors, and cracked, it is finally doing the one thing it was always shaped to do, which is to hold something of value behind glass where you can see it and cannot have it. Lux intrat ubi merx defecit.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
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