Coatings

A pan across Colorado's Book Cliffs, repainted frame by frame in Sargent's watercolor manner — the look of a brush that never touched paper. The image reproduces the mark of a process it never underwent. A bloom that once testified to water spreading through paper becomes the picture of a bloom; a stroke that recorded the movement of a brush becomes the likeness of a stroke. In Peirce-light terms, an index has become an icon of an index.

Nothing here has to behave as watercolor behaved for the image to look like watercolor. The material consequences of the medium have been separated from their appearance. What remains is portable enough to cross a landscape it was never made to describe.