In July of 2013 Carmen Papalia asked me to provide him with brief descriptions of three artworks of my own choosing.  He exhibited these descriptions in October of 2013. He then asked artist Jason Sturgill to translate my description into visual terms once more.  Here’s my text:

A large, red-orange square under an equally wide but squat, black rectangle. Two canvases, a tidy seam, one work. The black rectangle conscripts its opposite number though: the white walls join the black and red-orange. Three colors then, one work, a museum-loving creature, a parasite. And so the black takes command, a chunky little demon casting snow and white noise into the red-orange—of which there is just so much. So much. Color. Sharp, this red-orange—wide and tall; wider than me, taller than me. It hurts. Not heat, not a wall of flame, not the color of something or someone. No barn, no sunset, neither truck nor apple nor stop sign nor guillotine. But the discomfort of being too close to some turned-on thing, some electric cathode buzzing thing, an irritating guest, pressing you, following you. You want to see it; thrown back, you step back. Which doesn’t work. Because nothing comes into view, no grain, no detail, no stroke, no limits. The edges of the work are no more in their place than the red-orange blush and the bossy black. It’s not a picture. Of something. It’s a place where this not-a-picture happens, both in the white hard room and in the throbbing meat of your eye.

And here’s Sturgill’s translation, which can also be seen on his Instagram feed: