view22 October 2025
From Guston's studio notes in I Paint What I Want To See (2022): “The only true impulse is realism” (page 252). Felt applicable to my current headspace when I re-read it today, especially in conjunction with starting my morning by watching Phoebe Helander's recent talk at the New York Studio School, which was oriented around the act of deep looking within constantly changing surroundings, lack of attachment to outcome, and how cultivating sustained attention in one's practice leads to a fuller/less degraded life. It's significant how these concepts have continued to reappear in what I've been reading and watching the past few weeks, and how a realist impulse seems to clear the way for engagement with them all. But I think what Helander helped to elucidate is how it might be more useful to think of this approach not as something rooted in realism, but rather in observation-based absorption. No subject is better or worse than any other in this context.
view20 October 2025
Image inventory: Yena's small mirror spanning the corner of her room with a lump of laundry on top of it, a fallen green and silver metal tree sculpture in some shrubs beyond the wall lining the perimeter of Denmark Hill Station, a corner of my studio building near the bathroom (bricks painted over with white, paint severely chipped and faded), orange tomato soup with drip designs in single cream, morning light fragmented onto white walls upon entering through the three arch windows in Yena's living room, an advertisement that simply reads “MORE” in large orange capital letters, reflected light on wet cobblestone outside my studio during hard rain, Baryshnikov during his HeartBeat:mb, Yena's Monstera leaning toward one of the the aforementioned arch windows in her living room, glinting reflections of a glass cup and a glass bottle on a white wall warped by moulding, a sock Yena's mother left at her flat, a white dental mold on the street, a shadow cast by a car in a residential parking lot in the shape of a spade, Sankaty Head Lighthouse, London clouds confronting London trees, a shadow in the shape of a cross on a sidewalk.
view18 October 2025
Across a creek (working title): composed from photos of greenery blurring by out the window of the shuttle to Elaina and George's wedding in Dundee, Oregon (a couple months ago) as the winding road up the mountain crossed over Hesse Creek. This work's main concern turned out to be an exercise in the organization of perception. A balance between visual solidity/focus and active, physically-informed brushwork. A cross appeared in service of unifying the central trees (and the composition as a whole), yet its form is defined by the negative space between its constituent parts, which lands on a question of representation and visual memory that feels new to my vocabulary.
view16 October 2025
It occurs to me as I'm keeping on with this new body of work that, of the ten or so paintings I have around, only one is depicting a recognizably human figure. And yet the others still essentially feel like surrogates for the figure in their presence, physicality, and nonintellectual genesis—these are embodied scenes that are derived from and digested by the senses first and foremost, which seems to increase their ability to carry information about space and time that would otherwise be hampered by something deliberately chosen, pre-judged, or symbolically addressed. I think cultivating this trust in a naturally occurring subject matter via deliberate but open-ended tuning to and awareness/observation of everyday life is becoming really important for clearing the way toward getting at deeper problems of image and representation in paint.
view14 October 2025
”...To experience commitment as the loss of options, as a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress—this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end...”
From page 103 of Something To Do With Paying Attention by David Foster Wallace (the work is actually untitled, but was given this title by McNally Editions when they published it).
view12 October 2025
Working on a currently untitled painting that began after re-watching my mother's 2014 documentary Getting to the Nutcracker. Near the end of the film: transition after transition from backstage to performing, from dark to light, from solitary to grouped, from naked to clothed. Aligned with my recent study of Ed Ruscha's 1965 drawing Normandie—revisiting something familiar in a newer, simplified, contrasted, uncorrupted, willfully surface level way. LA. Harsh re-looking, re-considering, re-looking again. Negation again too, this time of information stored. A hard drive wiped clean. Stretching the thing further and further away like time has until it becomes an artifact represented in binary notation...digging things out of the luggage sitting in my studio, I found quite a few letters and stamps, including the 1984 signed Christo postcard that Stanley Hertzberg gave me commemorating the wrapping of the Pont Neuf.
view10 October 2025
“I have eliminated all text from my books—I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of 'facts'...” —Ed Ruscha
I keep encountering artists who describe their practices as being concerned with presenting factual information, which is interesting to me when considering the impulse to make a work in the first place. Because that impulse is rooted in a void, a lack of control. Which to me is predicated on an inherently personal set of formative life experiences, the remembrance of which is almost entirely internal/subjective/self-defined. So maybe factuality, in relation to visual work, is when specificity of circumstance meets the isness of an image such that one is separated from their conception of their individuality yet pulling purely from it.
view8 October 2025
In real time (working title): based on a recent visit to Rob Calvert's studio in Sag Harbor, during which he showed me a painting he made after a dreaming of an acid-washed mushroom cloud overlaid with a ghostly windmill. I think top of mind is capturing a similar effect that appears as a concrete visual certainty while retaining a provisionality that allows the painting to play not just with optical focus, but with the reliability of the image's logic. Which in this case has turned into an attempt to cancel out the conceit of the central plume, which is trying to locate itself at a dominant center. Maybe it's about looking into how close its context can come to impersonating it.
view6 October 2025
Destruction as well as building: decay and breakdown, as an organizing factor, through tactile application of paint, removal of paint, and accumulated touch. Rawness too. Midnight in Calvin's room, a theater and an event horizon. Light not as an indirect luminosity this time, but a directly applied (and removed) material with a separate identity from the initial layers. “Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it.”
view4 October 2025
Tumbleweed: Began as a rendering of my wallet, turned into an exercise in edges, light, geometry, transparency, layering, and subtraction. One of the purest cases of “sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it” (just going to keep quoting Johns). this an example of the latter. Which reinforces the inherent instability of habit in painting, how hammering a single source or relationship doesn't move anything forward. But an earnest openness and excitement toward new ways to work around forms as wireframes might.