The cable has been cut and the copper has come out of it in a spray, and it looks exactly like a brush.
That is not a comparison I went looking for. I got the drawing down in the alley, brought it back, started the underpainting, and about two hours in I realised I had spent the whole afternoon painting a brush and had not noticed. Fine strands, splayed from a ferrule, catching the light along their length and going dark at the tips. I own four things that look like that and I was holding one of them.
Somebody took a cutter to this line about eight inches below the housing. The sheath is black and has pulled back, and inside it the conductors have sprung open the way stranded copper does when the tension goes, and they have been out in the weather long enough to have gone from bright to that dull orange-brown that copper turns.
The red diode above is lit.
This is the panel where the thing I had been circling for eight months finally became undeniable. The camera has no feed. It is not connected to anything. Whatever it sees goes eight inches down a wire and stops. And it is still signalling, still red, still doing the one piece of communication it performs to the world below, and that signal was never about the feed. It runs off the power line, which is a different cable, which nobody cut.
An institution can lose its function entirely and keep its authority intact, provided the part that faces outward still lights up. I did not need a supermarket or a laundromat to learn that. It was on a brick wall the whole time with its guts hanging out.
I have painted the copper at the highest finish of anything in this series. Every strand is separate. There is a fair amount of impasto in the bright ends, and I let the ground come through underneath so the shadows between the strands stay warm rather than going to soot.
It is the most beautiful object in the twenty series so far, and it is a piece of broken infrastructure that a bored person made in under a second, and it is shaped like the instrument I have used every day for nine years.