November 3rd, 3:52 AM, in the service lane behind the appliance warehouse on Caroline, where a steel bollard stands guard over nothing and has done so since the loading bay was bricked up. The object had reached it somehow. Three weeks of wind had carried it four blocks, a distance I have since measured on foot, and the canopy by then was mostly absence. What remained was structure. Ribs, stretchers, the small brass joints, a webbing of shredded cloth strung between them like something a spider attempted and abandoned.
Bare ribs against a wet night read as radiance. I did not decide this; the physics decided it. Every wire caught the ambient wash off the far lamp and held one thin filament of light along its length, and the whole ruined frame sat up against the bollard with a dozen points of illumination fanning outward from a single collar. Caravaggio painted The Crowning with Thorns and gave the crown almost no attention at all. The men are the subject. The crown is a texture at the top of the frame, a scribble of dark. What he understood is that the terrible object does not need to be described. It needs only to be present and slightly out of focus. Mine is in focus. I could not help myself. The viewer will count the ribs and find two of them missing, and will not find them anywhere in the frame, because I looked for the better part of an hour and they were not there. The fourth station. It has stopped being an umbrella. It has begun being a diagram. Corona ex costis.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
| Unframed Print | Framed Print |