This is a painting of the part that is not covered.
The camera is in the picture, but it is small and it is at the very top, tucked under the soffit, and it is pointing away to the right. Everything below and to the left of it, which is most of the canvas, is outside what it can reach. I worked the geometry out over several nights with a torch and a good deal of standing in one spot, and the boundary runs roughly along the line where the wet concrete stops catching the streetlight.
There is a floor drain in the middle of the open ground. That is the only incident in the whole lower two thirds of the painting.
I have made a career out of insisting that people look at what is in front of them. This is the first time I have painted an absence of coverage, and I found it much harder than painting an object, because the subject has no edges of its own. It is defined entirely by something else’s limitations. The blind corner is not a place. It is a consequence of where a bracket was bolted, and if the installer had stood eighteen inches further along the wall it would not exist at all and some other corner would.
Every building has one. This is worth knowing and almost nobody does. The coverage is never complete, it is never intended to be complete, and the gaps are not chosen. They are left over. They are what the geometry did not happen to include, and they are usually the exact places where the ground is worn, because people find them without being told and use them without discussing it.
The concrete here is worn. There are dark patches where things have been set down repeatedly and a smoothness along the base of the wall that does not appear anywhere else in the alley.
I am not going to claim the blind corner is a sanctuary. That would be a nicer painting than the one I made. It is a rectangle of ground about the size of a small room where the building’s attention does not fall, and its value is entirely negative, and the people who use it are not free there. They are simply unobserved for a moment by one particular device.
That turns out to be enough to wear a path in concrete.