What is dross and what precious metal? Perhaps this small picture is the cupel wherein to assay our notions of aesthetic significance. Here, structural convection, inflamed color and metallic lustre all come together in an analog of the chemistry of fusion. This is essentially a digression, an extrinsic subject, an aesthetic anomaly. Yet, as art, it resonates with anthropomorphic associations. Even without specific human allusion, we interpolate the flux, energy, conatus of organic life. We read the signs of growth and decay because they are immanent in our own mortality. In awe of the awful, vital hope begets the beautiful. In art, unlike astronomy, the fatal, white giant yields the benign, red dwarf.