view13 November 2025
Continuing to work with humanless interiors. Bathrooms specifically. About to paint the one I've been assigned at this sublet. But what I have in mind has less to do with making a record of the space and more about creating something that can subdivide itself in the way that these places do in my memory as I burn through them. Discovered, serendipitously, Artschwager's Door Window Table Basket Mirror Rug drawings for the first time. Have been holding Door Window Table Basket Mirror Rug #10 (1974). Of the genesis of the series, he has said:
I flipped to a drawing of an interior, a room I had once occupied, and made a list of the six objects that were in it. I decided to take this as an instruction to make one drawing, then another, and another, and so on. The instruction endured and I “played” those six objects like I play the piano—I guess you could say that it was some kind of fugal exercise.
At this point I'm not interested in a fugal exercise as such, but I am interested in perceptual change located in something static, and how I can technically approach rendering that change in a way that subtly points beyond the confines of faithfulness to form.
view11 November 2025
One of the key ideas I was left with after chatting with Edith for the podcast was her awareness/description of painting as an experiential intervention. Which is useful to consider in tandem with attention—her work is characterized by its attentiveness, sensitive to shifting modes of embodied perception and what those different modes imply beyond the sensorial. But what speaking with her about the refinement of her approach taught me was that she is in a constant state of building, destroying, and rebuilding the logic that governs her relationship to deep attention, treating it as something with the potential for both tenderness and violence depending on how it is applied. And what is more important, as an artist, than holding oneself accountable to sustained, detail-oriented mindfulness in the process of reframing and representing experience for an audience?
view9 November 2025
In re-unconvering a more considered and precise approach to image-making, I'm aware of a kind of compositional trap that is threatening to emerge, so I'm writing this as a reminder to resist that. It's not useful, to myself or to others, to show images that worry about adhering to logical/neat compositional math. It's constricting. Discovered Susan Te Kahurangi King's drawings recently, (specifically have been studying documentation of those from her 2016 Drawings 1975-1989 show at Andrew Edlin), and they are refreshing in their complete indifference to this kind of presentability. Which I get the sense is natural for her. From some images I've seen of her working, she goes at it flat, nose to paper. As a result, the work grows out of an engrossed state and multiplies organically from corners, edges, or, according to a release I read, more spur of the moment starting points born from existing marks/creases on surfaces.
view7 November 2025
Two dreams last night split by waking up. The first was a recurring one where I am flying alone high above an urban downtown landscape, thousands of feet in the air. But it's not exactly flying, I'm not flapping my limbs to propel myself. I'm sort of floating, buoyant in the air. I can control my movements up and down in an indirect way, similar to how one might bring an eye floater from one's periphery into their direct field of vision by noticing how looking in a certain direction affects the movement of the floater. In the air I'm aware that I'm feeling a little bit of fear, but it's mostly blissful. Somehow I trust completely in my body's unique relationship to gravity. I can't detect the presence of any other humans from where I am, and there isn't any sound aside from the wind in my ears when I move through it. I simply bounce/float from skyscraper to skyscraper, just gently pushing off of a corner of each one I encounter rather than landing full stop. Each time I have this dream, I'm kind of figuring out the physics of it at the start, but by the end I have worked out how to navigate through the sky at a comfortable pace and it becomes pretty relaxing. Last night I had that dream, woke up around when the sun was rising over London, and then fell asleep again for about an hour. In that hour I had a much quicker dream where I was high in the air again, but this time I was over a bright aquamarine-colored ocean hanging by three silver balloons. I felt more fear in this situation, aware that the balloons were suspending my body and I didn't inherently have the power to float like in the first dream. After hanging for a minute or two, I willingly let go of the balloons and rocketed headfirst toward the water, picking up speed as I approached the surface. As I plunged into it I woke up, sat up in bed, and an ice cold shiver ran from my head to my feet—picture a laser-scan of an object from top to bottom as it is being digitized by some capturing device. It really seemed as though I was feeling the sensation of the water enveloping my body as I entered it.
view5 November 2025
Found Charles Wright's poetry for the first time. Kindred spirit. His mind, at least in his early work (which is all I've read so far, have a ways to go) vignettes the edges of his observation with a soft, lovely kind of darkness. Born from restraint, which is key—he says his poems come from “what I see, rather than from an idea I had in mind: idea follows seeing rather than the other way around,” so that darkness is meditative, solitary, contemplative. Implies an affirmation of sensation (Camus!) rather than a grasping for meaning. Pieces are noticed and arranged, organized by a hopeful and curious spirit with an ear for the kind of chance that feels inevitable after he has preserved it. Digging “Black and Blue” (1991) right now.
view3 November 2025
“Still-Life on a Matchbox Lid” (1991) by Charles Wright
view1 November 2025
Camus, The Stranger (The Outsider here in the UK). Meursault's harmonious state is detached—self-denial cloaked in self-acceptance. He isn't doing the crucial thing of confronting futility, in his case the kind he feels under the hot sun (which reminded me of a familiar, languageless vitality I have often felt myself, especially floating in the Pacific Ocean under the California sun).
Made me think of Cézanne with regard to lucidity and vision. Been spending a lot of time with Cézanne this week. There's almost a strain that comes through from the intensity of his yearning to wrangle a force along the lines of the very thing Meursault can't accept. Even as it resists him. Which it does by nature. So the work is the attempt, the proof of care in the face of indifference.
view30 October 2025
I see a lightness (working title): like so many things I've been working on, this again feels indebted to Merlin James (at least in my head). Likely because I spent time studying his 2020 painting Night this week, trying to absorb its sepia-toned treatment, its gentle but decisive subtractive marks, the economy with which it approaches depth and distance, its tonal range and the subtlety of its transitions between contrasting values. But beyond the technical approach (which, after all, I am gleaning from reproduction), I think what also drew me to it was that I have recently become excited by the challenge that working with such vast amounts of negative space poses—what looking deeper into emptiness could do to enrich attention and observation in the work and in an audience. Stretching the panel's limits as a container. I've watched the figure disappear from my work over the past few months and now I'm watching the non-human forms that have taken its place slowly disappear too. Or just step aside. So the shadows in Yena's shower is what my own new work that I'm referencing began with. It diverged in a useful way, mainly when some shapes I was going to initially anchor the bottom of the composition with dropped out, which gave the whole thing a lovely suspended, void-like quality. And cleared the way for the shadows to form a logic based around their range of translucencies.
view28 October 2025
In Yena's flat there is currently a hibernating colony of probably about a hundred ladybugs huddled on the corner of the moulding above the tall arched windows in her living room. They've been stationed there for a month or so now as the London weather has become colder with fall slowly morphing into winter. Most of them have remained clumped together the entire time, but every once in a while one will wake up, detach from the group, and go on a little excursion around the room. A few days ago, one parachuted down onto the table where Yena and I were having dinner. Yena gave it a small slice of cucumber. It munched on it for a while, took a little rest, and then returned to its colony. Just before I began to write this, one flew down and landed on the power cord plugged into my laptop. It has been hugging it since, like a monkey clinging to a tree—I think it likes the warmth.
view26 October 2025
On diversion completed today. Its conception was primarily spurred on by Merlin James's Oxbow (2023), which I've been studying for a while—the relationship of its marks and the unique character of its surface to the components of its landscape subject. My own painting is loosely based on miles upon miles of open road on Oregon Route 99W headed toward Dundee from Portland International Airport, the recall of which meshed nicely with a bit of Phoebe Helander's aforementioned talk in which she describes repeating a rose petal form over and over as she fails to capture it in shifting light, its glitching buildup becoming visual information that composes the image indirectly. I think I was also holding similar ideas about visually fading in and out, of constantly oscillating relationships between what has just been seen and what is anticipated to be seen. Of focusing, unfocusing, and optical warping through that process.