Evening on the walk beneath the Acropolis in Athens. A townhouse in an intact row has just collapsed, its interior gone to black, and a column of sunlit dust rises from the rubble toward the Parthenon, whose broken colonnade dates from 1687, when a Venetian shell set off Ottoman gunpowder inside it. In the foreground, six candles burn on a low marble wall for the six people who died.

I usually go looking for the light in a subject. Here I had to leave one place dark. The center of the fallen house is an unlit hole, and I kept it that way because that is where six lives were a few hours earlier, and no glow belongs there. The light went everywhere else. It catches the dust and carries it up the hill, so the new ruin and the old one are joined by one line. The marble has been through this before and is still standing. That gave me some comfort while I painted it, but not much, because stone that lasts is not the same as people who don't. The candles are the brightest thing in the lower frame, closer to us than the temple. I wanted the eye to finish there.