Your eye goes to the figure first. One small person on a staircase, halfway up, and everything around them is deep blue.
You look at the figure because they are the only warm thing in the picture. Then you follow the steps, because that is what steps are for. And somewhere near the top you realise you are back where you started.
The rule this painting obeys
The staircase loops. It climbs, it turns, it arrives at its own bottom step. What makes it work is that Carmen refuses to make a joke of it. The perspective is correct. The stone has weight. The figure’s shoulders sit the way real shoulders sit when someone has been walking uphill for a while. Nothing winks at you.
That is her whole method – one impossible thing, painted as calmly as a chair. Dusk blues, violet shadow, a low warm band on the horizon that the stairs never reach. One critic called it a figure climbing toward the beginning, rendered with the calm authority of someone who knows exactly how impossible things work. That is it exactly.
What happens after a week
You stop seeing the trick and start seeing the person. Some days it reads as a picture about being stuck. Other days it reads as a picture about someone who has made peace with the climb and is doing it anyway.
It is the dream you could not explain at breakfast, finally holding still long enough to look at.
Getting it up
Canvas, stretched over solid wood, an inch and a quarter deep, and it arrives ready to hang. One nail and it is done – no framer, no glass, no bill you were not expecting. The image wraps the sides, so there is no white border interrupting it from any angle. Matte, so a lamp or a window opposite gives you the staircase back instead of a reflection.
Portrait. Most people take the 16×20 (41 x 51 cm) at $149 – big enough that the stairs feel like somewhere you could stand. The 12×16 works in a narrow hallway; the 18×24 is for a stairwell or above a desk. Made to order, up to ten business days, free shipping in the continental US. A high quality print of her digital painting – nobody on your street will have it.
Who this is not for
If you want a picture that lets you off after one look, this is the wrong one. It is dim, it is cool, and it asks you a question every time you pass it.
If that sounds good, take it home. If you want to sit with it first, go see what else Carmen has painted – or follow her, and you will catch the next one before it goes up.
One is a piece. Two is a set. Three is a collection.
Almost nobody stops at one. A second work by the same hand turns a wall into a pairing. A third turns it into something you chose rather than something you bought. There are 2 other works by Carmen Delacroix available.
