view2 April 2026
Face (working title): Another painting of Calvin's room, this one a different corner of it than Destruction as well as building. Still thinking about John Lees, particularly APEX (2003-04) for the color weaving in and out of the scaffolding created by the years of buildup—buried here, luminous there, equal parts scraped away and globbed on. I think today was about working towards an expedited version of that kind of armature: tinted transparent primer, watercolor, and thin blotted washes of oil before the thicker top layer. And it seems to have worked; in terms of the pulse of the painting's end result yes, but more importantly as a track to alternate attaching to and veering off of. Which meshed reflected the subject—a wall peeling into multicolored strips, light and paint and stone relating to each other in clumsy, microscopic ways. Must also mention Bill Hayden, studying his ink drawings right now. His Structure (2022-23) is perfect.
view31 March 2026
In our last poetry workshop, Jonathan sent us on a Carl Phillips dive. First his 2018 essay Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax for At Length and then a handful of poems. “A Kind of Meadow” (2000) has been with me ever since. Very painterly. There's something about it that puts me in a place similar to Polke's Die Fahrt auf der Unendlichkeitsacht III (Die Motorradlampe) (1971)—every new door opens to a misdirect or redirect, but the flow of the whole remains cohesive and unencumbered. A particular example via enjambment in a middle stanza:
A kind of meadow, where it ends
begin trees, from whose twinning
of late light and the already underway
darkness you were expecting perhaps
And that's the rhythm all the way through, of starts and stops meshing and trading places. Which happens verbally in the mouth, but also visually; bones, branches, and fretwork form a grid that dapples both shadow and light, shooting both through the length of the poem. Words examining themselves as they are produced.
view29 March 2026
Ghost rain (working title): had this one turned around for a while, but I came back to it and I think it is now finally somewhat resolved. The core of the image came from standing at the threshold to the backyard in my house. The greenery at the end of the yard is like a portal for wildlife, especially for cats, and maybe that has been part of the fascination. But it must also be something about the perception/experience of a repeatedly visited place changing over time, both in sight and mind. Prunella Clough: ...the sense of place is crucial for me and involves sensations other than the purely optical ones of observation. But of course they coexist. Which is perhaps why I spent a lot of time with John Lees's work during the making of this one (especially his painting Bathtub [1972-2010] which, as the dates imply, matured and morphed over close to three decades—he explains this in a charming talk he did for the New York Studio School that you can find easily on YouTube). Prodding that link between the optical and the metaphysical. As my floaters start to visit more often with the sun slowly emerging here in London, I'm also considering different stripes of visual noise and their implications. Of how pieces of the perceiver can break off and join the perceived, both intentionally and spontaneously.
view27 March 2026
Alighting (working title): alighted at Wood Green station and noticed, for the first time, an odd and artful decorative ventilation grill up high on the tiled platform wall close to the ceiling. It depicts an idyllic scene in a panoramic Art Deco style—what appears to be a deer seated under a shining sun, flanked on either side by a flying bird and three trees. Turns out it's a bronze that was designed by the artist Harold Stabler (1872-1945) in the early 1930s for the station's unveiling in 1932, which he made along with two other unique templates (same size/dimensions) that now reside at Turnpike Lane and Manor House stations. Apparently the designs were meant to allude to the history and daily life of each station's neighborhood, which is something to sit with given the current state of things in that part of the city (more on that later, have been thinking a lot about the street life where I live). But I was initially drawn to it for the strange effect of the serenity of its subject matter rendered in what is now, nearly a hundred years after its creation, almost charcoal gray metalwork that floats on a mesh grid over the intense deep blackness of the vent's interior. There's one bit in particular that I've been working with, from the left half of it, where a bird's wing is clipped at the top by the boundary of the rectangle that frames the entire piece while its other wing is almost fused to a vertical line behind it. While in flight.
view25 March 2026
Found a Bush TR82 transistor radio in my house. The Bush company (still active) apparently takes its name from Shepherd's Bush in London, which as it happens was the first neighborhood I lived in when I came to the UK. This particular model was introduced in 1959 and was apparently popular for its design and portability. But I noticed it for its dial—wave frequencies and various cities around the world (Gothenburg, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Zurich, Glasgow, Bordeaux, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Prague, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Nice, Vienna, Athens, Rome, Geneva) encircle a tiny convex mirrored surface at the center of the dial. I've been carrying the radio around with me, using this mirrored surface to reflect spaces (and then photograph those reflections) as references. It's a wonderful thing that happens with the way this mirror compresses and simplifies spaces into contrasting tones and blocks of color; the mirror seems to heighten highlights and darken shadows. I'm wary of singularizing detail being lost in that process, but seeing a space minimized in size and reduced to its overarching tonal relationships has created a path towards exploratory extrapolation in my sketching process that is really proving useful towards approaching observation with a fresh sense of malleability.
view23 March 2026
Currently on the walls of my room: a small poster of Lee Seung-taek's Godret Stone (1956-1960) that Yena brought me from her most recent visit to the MMCA in Seoul, a small (2cm) plastic toy bee, Ruba Nadar's Mr. Sherif (2025), a small monoprint by Jonathan Tignor of a man floating supine in the middle of the composition—there's a moon in one corner and a sun in the other and the words “this is one future” at the top, a small dollar store mirror (distorted surface) with red-orange edges, a green collage of a leaf by Yena, an 11x14 inch pencil and pastel study of a piece of flint by my dad, a small 1980 Lee Ungno print (also a gift from Yena), a Polaroid of me and Yena in Paris, a photo of me and my brother Grey (probably around 1999) sitting on a bench with some space between us, a test print of my parents' wedding invitation (bouquet of dried flowers on a textured cream and blue surface), a photobooth print (probably from the late 80s) of my mom and dad, a small drawing of a vase of flowers by Toby Rainbird, a painting I made of Rosie from last year, a glow-in-the-dark plastic star, a watercolor on wood by Samantha Jackson, a screw with a tiny Korean fan magnet (Yena gift) stuck to its end and a broken rope bracelet (originally made by Yena's twin sister Yeji) hanging from its base, a copy of Yun Dong-ju's poem “Letter” (1941), a photo of my mom and sister Tessa on a ride at Disneyland, an earlier photo (probably around 1998) of my family at Disneyland (sans Tessa, who was not alive yet), a photo of me and Grey (probably around 2000) in oversized shoes, a photo of Tessa (probably around 2004) swinging from a rope tied to a tree.
view21 March 2026
Reproducing something here that Henry Curchod said via Instagram. The idea of conditions>outcomes is especially evergreen:
Sometimes it can be disheartening when you're reminded that mostly it's your accidents that are successful. In darker moments, there is a desire to reproduce outcomes rather [than] conditions. When you realize that you are a conduit for errors and good painting is full of failure made visible, of vulnerability, and persistent honesty, it can be difficult to manufacture the enthusiasm that's needed to knowingly make a thousand mistakes and try to reconcile them over again.
view19 March 2026
In my house there's a boiler manometer stamped with a tiny logo comprised of a bunny in a black rectangle just under the indicator needle. Turns out it's an early 2000s logo for The Vaillant Group, a leading and globally-active heating technology company. Apparently, according to the company website, on Easter Sunday of 1899 Johann Vaillant was reading the magazine Alte und Neue Welt when he found an image of a rabbit hatching from an egg. He bought the image and copyright to make it his company's logo, which it still is to this day. Amazing. Though sadly its design has morphed quite a bit. There's a little video on the same website showing the evolution of the logo—the original 1899 version is easily the most striking. Gorgeous and intricate, the egg shape stippled and fragmented with precision, the hare boldly portrayed in a deep inky black with an emotion somewhere between brave and apprehensive as it emerges from its shell.
view17 March 2026
Laurie Spiegel—The Expanding Universe (1980)
Ninajirachi—I Love My Computer (2025)
view15 March 2026
Discovered Joel Wyllie's wonderful work today. Lingers in a fresh, fertile, ungraspable land in a way that reminds me of the drawings of Trisha Donnelly and Jay DeFeo. Sparing, intentional, gentle use of color only where necessary, which elevates its potency. A good reminder. Curious about where his recent forms (thinking mostly of the drawings from his 2025 show Aerial the Projectionist at Foreign & Domestic) accumulate from—I remember seeing a photo of DeFeo's studio with a ballet slipper draped over a hanger bar. There's an interview he did around that show where he articulates something I've felt myself quite a bit recently in terms of seeing images while in motion: “...I have spent a lot of time driving since I moved to Suffolk five years ago, and have become increasingly interested in the branding on trucks and lorries. I love some of the minimal designs, the typography, the flat bold colors and the riveted surfaces. I saw a ‘Europa Logistics’ lorry recently driving down to London—its logo was a beautifully simple portrait of a woman in the wind, just red and white, painted huge on the side. It’s also the nature in which they’re usually seen—fleeting and at multiple angles. This interest has coincided with what feels like a simplifying of the forms in my work...”