January 16th, 7:58 AM, the same lot on Reeves, now hard, now white, the water gone to ice and the ice gone to that grey crust that takes a bootprint and keeps it for a month. I returned a sixth time to a series I had assumed the winter would end. Instead the winter finished the work for me. The three tarps I staked flat in December had been raised by nothing but freeze and thaw and their own stiffness, gathered at the crown by their own corner lines, and they stood: three cinched forms, waist high, their lower eighteen inches locked into clear ice thick enough that I could see the grommets through it, like relics under glass in a church too poor for a proper reliquary.
I did not build this station. I found it and I did not touch it. The sun was very low and came in from the left across the snow, and for eleven minutes the blue was not blue but violet, and the ice threw the sun back in a hundred small places at once. Standing in a vacant lot at eight in the morning with cold feet, I understood what the old masters were doing with ultramarine. Caravaggio ground his own from lapis carried overland from the East, and he spent it sparingly because it cost more than gold, which is why his blues, when they finally come, land like a bell. Mine cost eleven dollars a sheet. The bell is the same. The patch is on the middle form, tan against violet, at roughly the height of a heart. Gelu, non finis.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
| Unframed Print | Framed Print |