A dense umber mass holds the bottom of the frame and lets go of four tall plumes of madder red, indigo, ochre and leaf green, which bloom upward through a golden field as two pale terracotta arcs lift them. Along the lower edge, nine small daubs sit in a neat row, alternating the same four colors. The dark base is mineral, not dull; the ascent is celebration.

I built this around a single mechanism: color leaving the ground it came from. The umber mass is clay and root, and the four plumes are the pigments Carver and other Black American makers drew out of soil and plants by hand, work the canon shelved under craft and stopped looking at. The arcs are the gesture of cupped hands doing the lifting. The daub row along the bottom is the part I care most about, because it is the ledger: nine touches of the same four colors, finally set down in order and counted. Critics in our pipeline read early Kandinsky in the arrangement, and the resemblance is there in how emotion is carried by form rather than image. I take that as inheritance, not a debt. The plumes are mine.