G Minor - Research on Harmony - Variation 10

The entire chord in one octave. Three tones — D4, Bb4, D5 — span exactly twelve semitones, the smallest possible range that still contains two distinct pitch classes. The bass has been removed entirely. No G, no register below D4. What remains is the middle of the chord, extracted and held at arm's length, the arc completing its rise and fall within a space where all tones share the warm-light region of their respective families.

Eighty-five percent midtones. This figure defines the painting: an almost featureless expanse of warm intermediate color, orange-gold and mid-violet hovering in the moderate register, neither sinking into darkness nor rising into brilliance. The work carries almost no shadows and modest highlights — a near-uniform field that reads as the chord stripped of both its foundation and its luminous upper range.

Variation 10 arrives after a sequence of wide-spanning bells, and its extreme compression makes it the quiet center of the series — a single inhalation held without movement. The bell shape exists here only as a formal trace: D4 rising to Bb4 and then to D5, a one-octave gesture that barely interrupts the undifferentiated surface.