Circuit Board of SELF is the widest painting in the catalogue and the measurements say so without qualification. The hue spread across the canvas is 87 degrees against Odhni's 3 and Jheel's 13; the pigment luminance range is 65, from an ink black at the upper right to a sand at the centre right that is nearly white. Seven pigments, none of them a variant of another. Where the two transformations that preceded it spent everything on a single hue and made their range out of value alone, this one refuses that discipline entirely and takes the opposite position: every colour at once, all of them at full saturation, and the composition asked to hold them apart.
It holds them apart with seams. The pale strips running between the blocks are the structural device of the whole painting, and they were not drawn on top — they are the ground showing through where two blocks stopped short of each other. That is the same logic as the covering red in Odhni, arrived at from the other direction: there the structure was where paint stopped, here the structure is where paint never met. Form scores 5, the ceiling, and it is the only reading in the recent work that reaches it. Texture at 3 is doing quieter work than the eye first suggests — there is combing and vertical striation inside several blocks, but it is subordinate to the geometry rather than competing with it.
Underneath is Abstraction (2023), a 6 × 6 ft acrylic from Ephemeral Atmosphere scored at charcoal, graphite and oxblood with a colour range of 3 and a contrast of 3.0 — a soft, atmospheric, deliberately unresolved painting whose ArtGram was The Rudder. This is the first transformation in the catalogue to move a work out of Ephemeral Atmosphere and into Geometric Splendor, and the scores record the reversal precisely: colour range 3 to 5, contrast 3.0 to 4.6, form 2 to 5. The earlier painting was described at the time as a conversation with the unknown that did not need resolution. The later one resolves it into blocks. Whether that is an answer or a refusal of the question is the thing the painting is actually about, and it is worth noting that a title naming a circuit board of the self proposes the harder reading of the two.
Defiance
moving through declining to be absorbed elbowed stride holding the line
STANDING THERE
I stand like something caught mid-stride — weight already shifted forward, a beat before arrival. My shoulders square without my deciding to.
WHAT LINGERS
The yellow lingers. It's the last thing to enter and the first thing you miss when you look away — low light doing more than its size should allow.
WHO IT FINDS
This finds the part of me that was outnumbered and kept moving anyway, the part that was mistaken for noise and turned out to be a passage.
Where it lives
- LIGHT
- Even, generous light. The palette is wide enough that warm-only illumination pulls the olive and slate toward mud while pushing the magenta and crimson forward, which unbalances a composition that depends on its blocks holding equal weight. Neutral light keeps the seven fields reading as seven.
- MINIMUM CEILING
- 9 ft
- MINIMUM WALL
- 7 ft
- DAYLIGHT
- Strong enough to sit near glass or a bright window; the saturation won't wash