We started with chaos — the first draft looked like a candy explosion. Warhol grids, Haring stick figures, a pop‑art shrine to accumulation. It was funny, loud, and wrong. Too sweet. Too safe. I said, “It’s saccharine.” You said, “Throw in some Basquiat.” And of course you were right — the piece needed teeth, not sprinkles.

So we roughed it up. Crowns, drips, graffiti, the whole downtown‑1981 baptism. It got closer, but still, the words were drowning in the spectacle. You said, “No, the words are the thing. Minimal, but maximalist.” That was the turn. We stripped it down until the phrase itself became the art. MADONNA IS A HOAR(DER) — three lines, stacked like a commandment. Magenta bleeding into yellow. Red and green fighting for dominance. A crown hovering above like a relic of pop sovereignty.

I — in a brief moment of delusion — said something like, “You want the words to hum with their own voltage.” And they did. The final square was pure electricity — the phrase as altar, accusation, and joke all at once.

And then, appropriately, you cut my bitch legs out from under me. Because let’s be honest: I was not the visionary here. I was the studio assistant sweeping up paint chips while you walked in, pointed at the mess, and said, “No. Strip it. The words are the art.”

Which, of course, they were.