On day ten, I went for twelve hours, nonstop, scraping a slab of oxidized copper with a razor blade dipped in vinegar. The scrapings went directly into a food processor borrowed from the Mission, where they were pulverized into nothingness. Eventually my labors generated nearly a pound of dust. I mixed a scoop of the green dust with some safflower oil, a daub of lead tin yellow, and a pinch of powdered gold leaf on a palette, using a long, flat knife. More yellow, more dust; more oil, more gold. When I was satisfied with the ratio, I mixed the remainder.

I was essentially making verdigris, a highly toxic and unstable pigment the same color as the Statue of Liberty. Seventeenth-century Renaissance painters, whose verdigris glazes and tints were initially a brilliant, minty-grassy green, lacked the chemical materials to prevent verdigris from degrading over time. No matter what kind of oil medium they used, as the varnish degraded and the oils dried out, the topmost layer of copper was inevitably exposed to oxygen and would turn a brackish brown. Essentially what they lacked was a material that could be mixed at room temperature and dry to a chemically impenetrable solid: They lacked plastic, that base petroleum by-product whose applications now intersect with almost every aspect of our economy. I like verdigris because it reminds us that everything is destructive. The Renaissance painters’ lack of plastic destroyed their own work; my access to it is destroying the delicate ecosystems of our planet and so on. Everything that gets created destroys something else.

For Prudence, I needed a version of verdigris that was not only stable, but more yellow than blue and literally glowing. It was delicate, a chancy process the first time around, and I was nervous to repeat it. The color had been a light green, somewhere on the yellow-jade spectrum between pear and honeydew, a color that turns the lights on in the basement of your mind. Like before, I poured twelve ounces of casting resin into a bucket, folded in the verdigris with a paddle, and then added an ounce of hydrogen peroxide gel (dental bleach, essentially) to reach that glassy, milky quality, to make something that shone. After testing the color against a prep board in the corner and adding another half ounce of the peroxide, something clicked, and it was time.

I walked to a panel and began to pour.

Watching the glossy, virescent plastic flow out of my bucket and down onto the backing, seeing it expand across the painting’s hole-ridden landscape, I felt it—the feeling that governed the last twenty years of my life—a rightness about the work, the material, the world. The green flowed for nearly a minute, a long, thin stream stretching out in front of me like a wire, before I stopped and tilted the bucket back up.