Old whisky bottle · Vertical green pour, gravity-directed · Black and silver paint skin · Packing foam stopper · Holds falling-smoke incense cones
Vertical Pour · Paint Skin · Found Object
A portrait of falling smoke, made from falling paint.
Old whisky bottle · Vertical green pour, gravity-directed · Black and silver paint skin · Packing foam stopper · Holds falling-smoke incense cones
The concept
The incense I burn produces smoke that falls rather than rises. It’s heavier than air — it cascades downward from the source, which is the opposite of what most people expect smoke to do. That behavior is the subject of this piece.
The bottle needed to show it. Not describe it. Show it.
The green pour
The bottle stood upright during the pour. Green paint applied to the neck and shoulders, gravity pulling it straight down the body of the glass — no tilting, no intervention. The paint fell the way the smoke falls.
The streaks, the runs, the pooling at the base — these are a record of descent, not accidents to be corrected.
The shoulder — where gravity started its work. Green paint applied at the neck, falling downward. The black and silver skin wraps around the body below, meeting the pour mid-descent.
The skin
The smoke is a paint skin — black and silver, poured flat on a silicone sheet, cured, peeled, and wrapped around the bottle over the green. The cellular and swirling structure of the skin reads exactly like smoke caught in a photograph.
Not illustrated. Recorded. Black and silver against green glass reads as weight and density rather than light and transparency — the other end of what the skin technique can do.
The skin surface up close — black and silver acrylic poured on silicone sheeting. The swirling structure is cellular chemistry doing what it does. The result looks like a long-exposure photograph of smoke in motion.
The stopper
The stopper is made from white bendable packing foam — the kind that compresses and conforms. Curled into a shape that fits the bottle neck and seals it. The incense cones are stored inside until they’re needed. The bottle holds what makes the smoke. The outside shows what the smoke does.