Dawn is the worst light available to a painter and the only honest one for this subject, so I used it.
March 8th, 5:58 AM, the flood plain at the end of the industrial road where the city keeps what it has not yet decided about. The cone had been driven out there and left. No barricade, no trench, no lane closed, nothing at all to stand beside. Only churned mud running flat to the horizon, standing water in long grey sheets, and the town four kilometres off reduced to a row of orange pinpricks beneath a cloud bank that was beginning, reluctantly, to come apart in the east. The sky takes two thirds of the canvas. I intend that. In Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt there is far more landscape than the story requires, and the excess is the point: the figures have gone further out than the world was built to accompany them. Mine is two feet of broken orange in a field the size of a parish. The last of the streetlight behind me caught the base and one edge of the collar, which is the only reason it is visible at all. The sixth station of the Gospel of the Orange Traffic Cone. The viewer may notice that for the first time in this series there is no lamp overhead. The light comes from the sky now, and the sky is not aimed at anything. Sol oritur, nemo spectat.
Prints available. Acquire this work as a fine art reproduction, worthy of any wall that deserves better.
| Unframed Print | Framed Print |