"The Warning Without Danger": A Garabaggio Framed Print

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

November 9th, 2:52 AM, the far corner of the municipal lot behind the water treatment annex on Ferrier Street, where the asphalt has been repainted so many times that the old lines show through the new ones like a manuscript scraped clean and written over. There was nothing to warn me about. This is what stopped me. A single orange cone stood in the middle of a lot with no work in it, no trench, no wet paint, no hazard of any kind, and it stood there anyway. It had been standing long enough that the plastic had gone chalky and the reflective collar had dulled to the grey of old bone. The crown was already broken: a small notch bitten out of the tip by something, years ago, before I was watching. The one streetlamp still working laid a long ribbon of gold across the wet asphalt and stopped short of the cone's black base, which is precisely how the light enters Caravaggio's *Calling of Saint Matthew*. It does not arrive at the figure. It arrives near him, and the figure is left to decide whether it was meant for him. I painted it standing, and I painted the base heavier than it looks in life. The viewer should understand that this is the first station of the Gospel of the Orange Traffic Cone, and that everything that follows was already legible here, in the chalk of the plastic and the notch in the crown. It was guarding nothing. It was guarding the idea of guarding. Nine nights I returned before I brought the easel. *Cautio sine periculo.*

• 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