Observatory process
The figure is settled early. The room around it takes the rest of the film, through several grounds before the right one.
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The written description covers the same ground.
What the film shows
A silent time-lapse, thirty seconds. It opens on the finished picture, then returns to white, where the nested spheres are drawn as flat concentric rings in line and the standing figure is painted almost to completion very early. The rest of the film is spent on the setting: the same composition appears against a near-black ground, then a brown one, and at one point the tiled floor sits alone on the screen with nothing on it. The pale room and the receding grid are the last state.
The figure and the spheres are worked out quickly and then barely touched. Everything after that is the question of what they are standing in.
The grounds get tried and discarded in turn, dark then warm then pale. The finished picture looks inevitable and the film shows that it was not.
What it produced
The work →
Observatory