Someone came down this alley with a can of grey primer and put a stripe across the dome, and it ran before it dried, and the runs are still there.
I have thought about how to write this panel for longer than I spent painting it, because I do not want to be misread in either direction. I did not do this. I would not do this. Whoever did it had a purpose in that alley that I do not know and am not going to invent for them.
But I have to be honest about the fact that it is the most interesting the object ever looked, and that I was pleased when I saw it, and that being pleased about it sat badly with me for weeks.
Here is what is on the canvas. A grey stripe, roughly four inches wide, sprayed at close range so the edges are hard rather than misted. It has gone on over a wet dome, which is why it did not key properly and why it ran. Six or seven drips of varying length hang down off the lower curve, and the longest has reached the housing seam and stopped there in a small bead. The paint has dried matte, and the plastic around it is still glossy, so the difference between the two surfaces is the sharpest edge in the painting.
The red diode is visible through a thin place in the stripe. Slightly dimmed, slightly diffused, unmistakably still on.
There is a very old argument about images and the people who deface them, and it is not the argument most people assume. The one who paints out an image is not saying the image is nothing. They are saying it has power and the power is intolerable. Nobody defaces something they consider inert. In that sense the person with the primer can and I are in closer agreement than either of us would be comfortable with. We both stood in front of this object and concluded that it required a response.
Their response took about four seconds and stopped the camera working. Mine took eleven months and changed nothing whatsoever about the alley.
I am aware of which of us was more effective. I am painting it anyway, which is the only argument I have ever had for any of this.