The Sangam

The canvas landed landscape because that is how it fell on the sawhorses.

I want to start there, because it is the truest thing about this painting and the least flattering to me. Underneath The Sangam is a painting called Spiraling, made in 2022 — a chromatic riot, pink and red and green and blue all arguing, combed in great sweeping arcs across a portrait canvas. It was finished. It had stopped speaking to me. The topography was still magnificent.

I set it down on the trestles the way it went down, which was sideways, and I painted what was in front of me. Every arc in that old painting is now running in a direction it was never made to run. The spirals became a crossing. Four arms, meeting.

I did not decide that. A sawhorse did.

Friday, I laid in the blues. Several of them, mixed together and into each other — cerulean, cobalt, ultramarine going down toward indigo and then toward nothing. Then I left for the mountains.

The painting sat for two days doing what I could not do for it, which was dry.

I came back Sunday afternoon and went straight at it. I put a lighter blue where the arms come together, because the meeting wanted light — and it was garish. Too bright, too pleased with itself, a lamp switched on in a room that had been managing beautifully with the dark.

So I waited until it was half-dry and went back in with darker blues, and merged everything.

And that is the thing I want to tell you. The glow at the center of this painting is not light I added. It is light that survived being covered. I buried it and it came up through. Everything in this canvas reads from underneath — the ridges of a painting made four years ago, and a brightness I tried to take back and could not entirely.

The moment the darker blues pulled the whole surface together, I knew it was finished. I have said for years that the work signals its own completion and that I only listen. That is easy to say and hard to point at. Here I can point at it. It was that stroke, and it was not a decision, and I stopped.

Sangam is the meeting of rivers. At Prayag the Ganga and the Yamuna come together, and a third river — the Saraswati — is said to join them there, though no one can see it. It has no visible source. It is the reason people come.

I did not set out to paint that. I set out to paint blue on an old canvas that had gone quiet on me. But when I stepped back there were arms flowing inward and there was light at the meeting, and the light had no source you could trace, and I grew up in a house where that story was not a metaphor.

Three rivers. Two you can see.

The whole painting is nearly one color. This is the narrowest range I have worked in — after two canvases this month that shout in primaries, this one drops to a single blue in a dark room. What carries it is not color at all. It is the comb: ridge after ridge, catching the light and throwing it, and the ridges belong to a painting that no longer exists.

Stand close. The tooth of it is not mine, not recently.

Two rivers you can see. The one you cannot is why you came.