She worked on it for six weeks.
Not continuously — she had learned, through the first three paintings, that sustained uninterrupted work produced a different quality of result than work that moved between immersion and distance. The fourth painting required both. The full city from above, the complete schematic visible, the original architects' design operational — that subject required the wide view that only distance could produce and the intimate understanding that only immersion could provide.
She worked in the mornings, usually, when the estate was in its early rhythm and the light came through the painting room windows at the angle she had been studying for weeks. She stepped away in the afternoons to walk, to read, to sit with the others in the spaces between their individual activities. She came back to the canvas with the perspective that stepping away produced — the specific quality of seeing clearly what immersion had made difficult to see.
He gave her the space.
