The joke

“Hand-worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of bristles visible -- and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke as Horst called it, although it’s really both, the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone. It’s the place where reality strikes the idea, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke.” Donna Tartt. The Goldfinch

I dip my brush into the paint pot to charge it with bone black, but in its pathway - a comet’s trail smear of contaminated forgotten white arcs across the surface. The painting is done.