At dawn, a gilded triumphal arch stands half-built in scaffolding beside rows of white headstones, its crane a thin lattice against the pale sky. The same raking light touches the gold leaf and the gold-rimmed stones, and the stones hold it better. On a headstone in the foreground, a sparrow has landed.

I painted the arch the way its builder would want it: enormous, gilded, catching the first light. Then I let the light keep going, down the rows, and it turned out the small stones take it better than the gold does. Scale is the easiest thing to buy and the hardest thing to earn, and the ground here is contested because the arch went up before the permission that the law requires. I kept the crane as an open wireframe so you can see through it to the sky, the structure still provisional, still refusable. The sparrow on the near headstone is the size of a thumbprint. It is the only thing in the painting that chose to be there.