Keystones Grayed, Corbel Thick With Soot

I found this corner of the vaulted ceiling where decades of smoke have laminated the corbel stones into something closer to obsidian than limestone. The structural arch here is purely functional — no ornament — and that honesty is what stopped me. I shot it flat against the ceiling plane so the geometry reads almost as abstraction, the encaustic later pulling out the buried warmth still living in those stones.