The Blue Sanctum

Something in this painting has stopped moving, and started giving off heat.

The blue stands. It rises out of the lower edge and arches — not a door, not a wall, but a source. Look at how it's made and you can see the event happening: ring after ring combed outward from a center, each one pushed a little further into the orange, the way a struck bell keeps sending its sound into the room long after the strike. The rings are not decoration around the form. The rings are the form, radiating.

And the field is not attacking it. This is the thing I did not understand until I stepped back. The heat around the blue — cadmium, vermilion, deepening to a bruised madder along the right edge — is not laying siege. The blue is making it. The warmth in this painting proceeds from the cool thing at its center, which is a strange sentence to write and the truest one available.

At the base, a band of teal lays itself down like a threshold. Everything above it radiates. Everything below is where you stand.

The whole surface is combed by hand while the paint is still wet — concentric inside the blue, a woven grid across the orange, so that even the field carries the memory of being worked. Nothing here is smooth. Nothing here was left alone.

I finished it and what came up was sanctum: a sacred interior. Not a fortress, which keeps things out. Not a temple, which asks for something. A place that simply stands where it stands and gives off warmth, and asks nothing, and answers nothing, and is not diminished by being unvisited.

I stopped when the radiating felt finished.

The heat looks like the loud one. The blue is what's making it.