Look back
This painting is more accurately described as a background color with a painted thing stuck on top of it rather than as a liminal space from within which the painted thing emerges. It shows what I was trying to work out at the time, which had something to do with there being nine layers of Troy, each built on the ruins of the previous. The background, the evidence of forming, and the final iteration are more mutually distinct than in later paintings, the relationships more constructed, antiseptic, as if it were a scientific illustration of my process rather than an embodiment of it. This is the one that, in form and function, is most like a mouthwash.