I didn’t plan this for the day after Easter, but it’s finished now and here it is. And I’m in Italy, with images of pierced hands and empty tombs and bereft worshipers everywhere I look. I’ve noticed something about the images of Jesus being taken down from the cross. His skin is gray and flat. Mary holds him. Hers is warm. When light enters the living skin, it doesn’t stop dead in its tracks. It keeps bouncing around in there. The best artists make the distinction subtle. No flat goblin greens. Just one skin a little duller. And the other still alive to mourn, still able to touch. The line between life and death marked by nothing more than how the light flows. Is it interesting how these renderings are made? I think so. This is the simplest one I’ve done and also the most technically complicated. Each simulated ray of light bounced sixty-four times before coming to a rest. So the light doesn’t come from one source, but from the light reflecting, flowing and changing across every object it meets. The milk is not rendered as a solid, but a cloud. Billions of imaginary particles send the light scattering in every direction. I can set the density of those particles. Less dense and the milk looks thin, like dishwater. More and it looks as rich as cream. Too much and it’s opaque as chalk. The camera sends a line out. When it hits an object, it records it. This is called ray tracing, and Albrecht Dürer invented it in 1525. When he did it, he would tie a string to a wall. An assistant traced the string’s tip along the objects he drew. He then recorded the outlines they formed. When I did it, the computer sampled each pixel 8,192 times. Every recording is probabilistic, and thus slightly different. What you’re seeing is an average of each of those recordings. Little molecules flowing around each other. Light being tossed out until it lands on something. Something dead coming to life. “Milk”, 2022. Simulated small scale still life installation of whole milk, hand blown glass, glazed white ceramic, eggs, red ink, linen, muslin, marble, fake dust, and Wellbutrin 300XL.