I have tried, failed, and cleaned up; now it's your turn

《我尝试过，失败了，也收拾好了；现在轮到你了》 is the title Rabo Karabekian gives to eight panels stripped of their failed blue painting and restored to dazzling white. What begins as an exorcism of an unhappy artistic past, and is imagined as a last work to be explained at his wake, becomes something less settled: after Edith dies, Rabo unlocks the barn, looks again at the white panels, and goes out to buy the supplies with which he might paint. The title sounds like a conclusion, but its final words make the blank surface an invitation to begin again.

The Restored Panels

Rabo has every trace of the unfaithful Sateen Dura-Luxe removed from the eight panels, then has them restretched and reprimed. Their whiteness recalls their condition before he transformed them into “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen.” The restoration does not simply erase a ruined picture. Rabo describes the project to Edith as an attempt to exorcise an unhappy past and symbolically repair the damage he did to himself and others during his short career as a painter. Yet he also acknowledges the limits of that explanation: putting the project into words cannot explain why or how a painting came to be.

The setting is part of the work. The panels stand in a long, narrow barn a century old, beneath powerful floodlights suspended from ceiling tracks. Rabo had those artificial suns installed for the commission to create “Windsor Blue Number Seventeen”; now their light pours over the repr primed surfaces, making the white brighter than he had thought white could be. The space and its lighting belong to the picture’s effect, even though the panels themselves remain unpainted.

A Title and a Proposed Last Painting

When Edith asks what he will do with the work next, Rabo answers that it is done. He refuses to sign it, reasoning that even a flyspeck would spoil it. Asked whether it has a title, he supplies one on the spot: “I Tried and Failed and Cleaned Up Afterwards, so It’s Your Turn Now.” Its length recalls the title Paul Slazinger gave his book on successful revolutions, but Rabo’s phrasing turns the work toward failure, repair, and succession. The title presents a life’s work not as mastery but as an account of having tried, failed, and cleaned up after the damage.

The naming also makes the blank panels communicative without settling what they mean. Rabo has called them finished, yet their untouched surface leaves room for an act that has not happened. The title’s address to whoever comes next sits in tension with his refusal to add even a signature: the picture appears complete as an object while directing attention beyond the person who made it and toward the next person’s turn.

Rabo imagines his own death while considering what people might say about him afterward. At this point, he has locked the barn with only one padlock and hasp, and assumes, as his father and most husbands do, that he will die before Edith. He gives her instructions for his wake: hold it in the barn, describe the white panels as her husband’s last painting even though he did not paint them, and tell people the title. The intended scene would make the work’s blankness part of its memorial meaning, with Edith as its witness and interpreter.

Edith’s Death and the Change in the Work

The plan is overturned when Edith dies first, only two months later. Her heart stops and she falls into a flower bed; the doctor says there was no pain. Her wake takes place at the home of a friend of hers a mile up the beach, and Rabo does not attend. He also does not reenter the house where, for a third of his life and a quarter of the twentieth century, he had been useless, contented, and loved without reason.

Instead, he goes to the barn, unlocks its sliding doors, turns on the lights, and stares at the white. The action returns him to the work after the loss has made his imagined posthumous explanation impossible: the panels are no longer simply a backdrop for a wake he expected Edith to conduct. They are what he can face after Edith’s death, and his attention to them leads directly to a new action.

Rabo gets into his Mercedes and drives to an East Hampton hardware store that carries art supplies. He buys everything a painter could wish for except the ingredient he says he must provide himself: “soul, soul, soul.” This purchase changes the force of his declaration that the work is done. The panels may have been finished as a symbolic repair and as the imagined last painting, but his return to painting is not finished in the same way. The blankness that once marked an ending becomes the condition for work to resume.

Meaning and Afterlife

The title holds resignation and renewal together. Its first part admits defeat and cleanup; its final words hand responsibility onward. That handoff is not a claim that the panels already contain a new painting: Rabo has specifically restored them to white and insisted that he has not painted them. Rather, the title turns the unpainted surface, and the history of damage behind it, into the starting point for whatever comes next.

The barn scene also complicates Rabo’s claim that the work is complete. He refuses to sign the panels because a flyspeck would spoil them, yet after Edith’s death he returns under the lights and buys the tools of painting. The contrast does not resolve whether the white panels themselves are the finished work or the beginning of another one. It gives the object its central tension: a memorial to artistic failure that becomes bound up with Rabo’s renewed willingness to make pictures, and an ending whose title passes the task to someone else even as its maker takes up the task again.