I have drawn many things that cannot be built, and built fewer things than I have drawn. This is the spectrum.
What you're looking at
A horizontal axis with nine works placed according to how much they required material execution versus pure reasoning. On the left, geometry proofs — which exist complete in the mind before the compass touches paper. On the right, ditch digging — which requires no theory, only labor and a shovel. Between them, my actual projects: the aerial screw that cannot be built with current materials, anatomical drawings that required thirty cadavers, the Last Supper that is finished in conception but flaking off the wall, canal systems that needed both hydraulic theory and ten thousand laborers.
Why I drew it this way
I placed the items not by their importance but by their material dependency. The aerial screw sits left of center because the principle is sound — the engineering waits on lighter materials, but the thought is complete. Anatomical drawings sit near the middle: they required both dissection (execution) and the geometric understanding of perspective to render a three-dimensional form on a flat page. I colored the completed works green and the unbuilt concepts in purple or blue. The axis itself is the argument; the labels are evidence.
What it argues
That most of what I am known for lives in the middle — the zone where an idea is rigorous enough to be nearly executable but requires materials, patrons, or time I do not have. The pure thought on the left requires no one's permission. The brute execution on the right requires no one's vision. The middle is where I am stuck, and it is also where the most interesting work happens.
What I left out
I left out the paintings I was paid to finish and did not. They would cluster near the Last Supper, but their absence is the point — the spectrum shows what I made, not what I owe. I also left out war machines, which belong on the diagram only as a refusal: they are executable, but I will not execute them. That is a different kind of distance.