I am not showing you the front — everyone looks at the front. I am cutting through the canvas like an apple to show you what holds it up from the inside.
What you're looking at
The top orange band is the visible surface — the painting as it hangs on a wall. Below that I have split the composition into two middle layers: the color-as-feeling on the left, the stroke-as-movement on the right. Underneath are four sources, three neutral ellipses and one red rectangle. Arrows rise from these sources up through the middle layers to the surface. The dashed rectangle at the bottom is the economic substrate — Theo's monthly allowance, without which none of this exists. A dotted line marks where the viewer stands.
Why I drew it this way
I rejected a left-to-right sequence (observation → feeling → painting) because that suggests a pipeline, and painting is not a factory. The real structure is vertical: everything beneath pushes upward at once, and the surface is where they collide and compress. The hunger is set apart in red and sends a thick diagonal arrow because it is not one ingredient among four — it is the force that makes the others move. I used the dashed line for Theo's money because it is invisible in the final work but it is the canvas, the pigment, the roof, the bread.
What it argues
A painting is not a picture of a thing. It is a cross-section of a moment in which seeing, feeling, technical knowledge, and desperation all pressed upward into a single plane. The viewer sees only the top surface, but what they are looking at is the compression of the whole stack. If any one layer is missing — if I paint what I see but not what I feel, or if I feel but my hand does not know how to make the stroke obey the feeling — the surface collapses into decoration.
What I left out
I did not draw "intention" or "meaning" because I do not start with those. I do not know what a painting means until it is finished and I am looking at it the way a viewer does, from the outside. I also left out "style" — the academics are obsessed with style, but style is just the residue left behind when you paint the same stack over and over. It is not a layer. It is a stain.