The studies were propped on the floor because the walls of the hired room were not to be trusted with wet paint. Each one had been worked toward a blue that the sea only manages at about four in the afternoon, and then only if a cloud agrees. The painter had used a medium that stayed open, and so the colour remained tacky a week later, collecting a little of the room: a hair, a doubt, the print of a careful thumb at the edge. I was asked, implicitly, to admire resolution. I admired the opposite. A surface that will not dry is a surface that has not yet lied about being finished. Looking at it, I had to accept that my review would be of a thing still in motion, and that certainty would have been a ruder instrument than the brush.#
This is an excerpt. The complete piece is in the print and digital edition of Issue 02.