"The Opening of the Ticking": A Garabaggio Framed Print

Oil on digital canvas, 2026. Post-Consumer Baroque series.

June 28th, 1:33 AM, and by then I had stopped counting how many nights I had come down to look at it, which is not at all the same as saying I had stopped coming. The seam had gone. Along the whole near edge the ticking had split, one long irregular tear running from the corner nearly to the middle, and through it you can see what a mattress is actually made of, which is dark matted fiber, coarse, pressed, the color of wet felt. Nothing decorative. Nothing anyone was ever meant to see. At this distance the damask is enormous: each printed rosette is the size of a hand, and the blue in them has held better than anything else in the picture. The battery lamp I work from was set high on the wall to the left, so everything in the frame takes its light from one corner, which meant the tear itself stayed dark, a black channel running through a lit field. Caravaggio's *Incredulity of Saint Thomas* is not really a painting about the wound. It is a painting about four heads crowded into one small space, a single light source somewhere off the left edge, and the silence of three men watching a fourth find out he was wrong. I painted the opening the way he painted that gathering: close, crowded, quiet. This is the fourth station, and the first in which the object stops being intact. The viewer is not invited to look away from a seam.

• Premium black frame with white mat and acrylic glazing
• Giclée printed on acid-free, gallery-grade 220 gsm paper
• REACH-certified inks, sustainably sourced woodstock
• Ships worldwide via Printify fulfillment