The bulb has moved.
Two panels ago it sat at the top of the drum, dead centre, still, a small round sun in a pressed housing. Here it is at the upper left and it is no longer round. The rotation has dragged it into a comma, bright at the head and trailing off, the way a slow exposure treats a moving light. That is the whole of what I want to say about this painting, but I will take the long way to it.
What is in the circle: gold in the upper half, a heavy red lobe at the lower left, a blue one at the lower right. Three fields of colour arranged around a centre, held apart, filling a wheel. I did not sort them. The load sorted itself, because a drum at speed throws the heaviest fabric outward and the lightest to the middle, and the reds and blues in that machine happened to be jeans and a wool blanket.
Everybody looking at this will say rose window and they will be right. I would rather say what kind of rose window, because the differences are the point.
A rose window is fed from outside the building. Its light is the sun’s, arriving through the wall, and the apparatus exists to convert weather into colour for the people standing under it. What moves is the day, slowly, across the floor of the nave.
This circle is fed from inside itself. The light is nine watts of tungsten bolted to the back of the cylinder. It faces inward, at the cloth. And it turns, which is the part that has kept me up: there is no rose window in the world whose light source travels around behind the glass. Chartres does not do this. Nothing does this. The one circular illuminated wheel I have ever stood in front of that carries its own moving lamp is the door of a commercial washing machine.
The divisions are wrong too, and better for being wrong. A rose window is held together by lead. Every colour is separated from its neighbour by a black line that was cut and soldered by a person, and that black armature is half the drawing. There is no lead here. The red is against the blue directly, wet, with a soft dark seam between them where the shadow of a fold falls. What separates the colours is the clothes themselves and the speed of the drum, and it will not hold. In four minutes it will be a different arrangement, and in twenty-eight the whole thing will go dark and grey and stop.
So it is a window that makes its own light, keeps it inside, moves it, sorts its colours by force rather than by design, and lasts less than half an hour.
I painted it at eighty centimetres across, larger than the machine, because I wanted somebody to walk toward it in a room and feel the size of it change.
There is no one in the picture. There was no one in the room. This arrangement of red and gold and blue occurred at approximately eleven forty at night, in front of an empty chair, and was never seen by the person whose clothes made it.