Editing Openai/691871e9-61d8-8006-bf05-8aa974c604bb (section)

=== Assistant: Interpretation of Moonrise Including the Verso, While Kate Is in Samaná, DR ===
Interpretation of ''Moonrise'' Including the Verso, While Kate Is in Samaná, DR

The verso of Moonrise transforms the artwork into both a painting and a dispatch—a personal, almost meteorological record sent across distance. The recto offers a geometric meditation on lunar ascent; the verso anchors it in lived experience, time, and place. Together they form a diptych of observation and transmission.

The envelope-like verso marks 2:24 AM, 91° east, and a 19.4% waning crescent—data that echoes the painting’s plotted arcs and dotted vectors. These annotations reveal the celestial conditions that informed the composition; the moon in the painting is not symbolic but observed, tracked, charted. The act of recording is as important as the act of painting.

The handwritten address to Kate Purcell, accompanied by the note “Morning Walk / 42° / 81% R.H.”, turns the work into a field journal of intimacy. While Kate is in Samaná, Dominican Republic—half a world of light, humidity, and sea away—the painting becomes a tether: the moon that rises over Baltimore also rises, hours later, above the Dominican coastline. The verso’s address makes the painting a kind of lunar postcard, sent not through mail but through image.

The green border drawn loosely around the verso mirrors the mountain’s green contour on the recto—another quiet echo across sides—suggesting that boundaries in Purcell’s work are porous: between image and document, between art and correspondence, between two people separated by geography yet synchronized by a shared moon.

Thus, Moonrise becomes both a cosmological diagram and a personal message. The painting charts an event in the sky; the verso charts an event in the heart. And in the space between Baltimore and Samaná, the moon binds the two vantage points into a single continuous arc.