view24 July 2025
A friend made an argument recently for detail in the attention age, and I get it. But I think there's a more subtle angle to take toward slowness and staying power, which I'm beginning to find in the relationship between a painting's tactility and its imaginal qualities. This feels related to memory—how its repeated attempts to solidify experience are wrestling matches with the phenomenological. There's an analogue in working with the materiality of paint and maintaining an awareness of how it speaks to the surface; I'm realizing after reading some of my recent entries here that I don't necessarily mean honing in on a specific kind of treatment anymore, either. Thin, thick, scratched, removed—it's all addressing a reaction between image and paint. A distinctly different concern from the one between image and time.
view22 July 2025
Amulet continued: surprised that it resolved itself as well as it did. It's successful, but walks a dangerously thin line; forms moving in and out of each other can so easily skew superfluous/empty. But I think it works because its anchor is firmly planted in exploring color relationships and negative space, which allows for a little more liberty with shape and form. Indebted to Milton Avery in general, but especially in conversation with Red Rock Falls (1947), I think.
view20 July 2025
Amulet: the logic that governs what this painting is becoming is fresher and less encumbered by achieving muscularity than anything surrounding it in the studio. These forms are ghostly (aside from the black squares, which may have to change) and in touch with negative space in a way that feels related to their guiding concern, which I suppose is memory. The ember of a thing from a faraway past still burning despite how small and foreign it might seem to me now. Something luminous and formative, yet dulled and disintegrating through its translation into paint (and therefore the present).
view18 July 2025
Rosie (after Joe Brainard): in memory of Rosie through the lens of Brainard's Untitled (Whippoorwill) (1973-74), a portrait of Kenward Elmslie's whippet (one of a handful he did of the dog. All are lovely). There are the paintings we make to share, and there are the paintings we make for ourselves first and foremost. This one belongs to the latter category, though I'm not ruling out the former necessarily. It's just the first time in a while that I've honored a realist impulse, which felt appropriate for this tribute and is why I chose Brainard as a starting point. I never knew him personally, but the way he sees animals in his work intuitively feels similar to my relationship with them—as pure as a thing can be and something that should stand on its unembellished own. I miss Rosie.
view16 July 2025
Scope: Deeper into the seams that bind line and paint, interior life and landscape. This time through the eye of a penitent or hopeful apparition. We're lined up in her gun sight, the grass well-watered, a cloud or halo coming to. There's more to be had in the disorganizing and unfussing though.
view14 July 2025
On the heels of talking to Danny and the resulting R.B. Kitaj references, I'm thinking about compositional fracturing, of the regeneration of motifs through optical strategies. Wish I had given Danny a little more space to unspool that thread through the lens of his current subject matter, and I suppose that's partly why I'm noting it here. In any case, for me much of his work's dynamism comes from the patience with which he coaxes light, color, and form into an equilibrium that sets meaning aside during its genesis, and the way he is beginning to repeat motifs in that process is allowing for the structure of the motifs themselves to become malleable. That's exciting. I find that in Kitaj too, in the way his figures often seem to sprout from or imply an underlying geometry.
view12 July 2025
Found a small invoice book at the post office that came with two pieces of blue carbon paper to use for copies on the blank pages that follow each invoice page. A welcome coincidence—as I think more about the relationship between drawing and painting, printing has now squeezed its way in as well. Comes at a time when I've been spending a lot of time looking at Degas's black and white monotypes, which are masterclasses in working with/thinking about volume. Line and mark-making are obviously important in them as well, but to my eye those elements serve to accent, clarify, and cohere dense maps of space born through volume by value. They also bring attention to the edges of forms in a way that I have maybe subconsciously approached but haven't addressed directly yet, which is exciting. There's a vibration, a restlessness that partners so harmoniously with the aforementioned density. A honed way of looking in both absolutes and specifics.
view10 July 2025
Nice piece on Joachim Patinir's The Penitence of St Jerome (1515) by Dylan Vandenhoeck, been holding what he says about how that work “embodies a situated, shifting engagement with the world” in its approach. Has made me sit longer with the idea of the confluence of observable space and inner space (with regard to the optical). I think where I can meet him is my relationship with memory, which seems like it is becoming more important to me than the observed present. Recall filtered into illusionistic space feels related to how he describes the painting as “a landscape of interiority made exterior. The rocks, the trees, the streams, and paths become the spatial correlate of Jerome’s self—his perception, his struggle, his consciousness.” I like the idea that the logic of a painting could be both independent from and intrinsically linked to the maker, and what might arise from an awareness of those two forces in dialogue.
view8 July 2025
Off the back of making Link and spending more time with Samuel Hindolo's work, I'm becoming excited by the possibilities of thinness and drawing right now, what the interplay between pencil and brush can produce and suggest, especially on a surface like panel. A disappearing structure, a complicated relationship between resolution and dissolution. To encounter something fragile and weather-worn feels relevant right now, like it can be a conduit for an encounter with a more real sense of the breakdown hidden behind the solidity we think we see.
view6 July 2025
Energized by discovering Samuel Hindolo. Closest thing to visual poems I've encountered in a while. There's overlap and accumulation in much of the work, a tactility that implies slowness and lived-in inquiry. But there's also an delicate softness to his touch and handling of tones that suggests these buildups become carefully considered scaffolding for developing ideas, or that they aren't necessary groundwork for attempts. In this way narrative is implied but fractured, symbols prioritized for both content and form depending on the context. Keep thinking about thirty pieces of silver from his 2023 show at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin—at least the reproduction of it I have saved. What it's doing with the horizon bringing the impending to the present feels charged and of now, but without a heavy whistleblowing hand. A vestige of something potent and undead.