Faucet Repair

12 August 2026

Firmly in the floating world after finding a robust Hokusai monograph at Edith's. These are the works that have been with me since:

Girls at their Toilette, from the series Seven Stylish Foibles (late 1790s) Mountain Tea-house, album-plate from Mists of Sandara (1798) Pheasant in Autumn from Album from Life (c. 1814)

Incoming waves/Receding waves, from Hokusai manga (1815) *One of the best artworks I've ever seen...

Turtles in Sayama Pond, from Hokusai manga (1817) Sunset over Ryogoku Bridge from Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji (early 1830s) Mt Fuji from Kajikazawa, from Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuiji (early 1830s) The Horse-washing Falls, from The Waterfalls (c. 1833) Suspension-bridge between Hida and Etchu, from The Bridges (c. 1834) Tiger in the Snow (1849)

It was really my first time swimming in the totality of his work, and the first thing that comes to mind as it settles in my head is rhythm. Rhythms of nature; human inclusive. Devotion to its majestic indifference. Waves, waterfalls, hair, fabric folds, wood grain, turtle shell patterns, bird feathers, shifting clouds, and, of course, geologic formations. His stillness is singular, frozen solid yet flowing. I thought often of Turner's Snow Storm (1842), and it's lovely to think about both of them working at the same time—their timelines overlapped almost completely.

I sent Tiger in the Snow to my dad, and he responded with recently captured images from the Inouye solar telescope that show the surface of the sun in more detail than ever seen before. A network of burnt-golden vortices cycling and spiraling. He was right—it looks just like the pattern of the tiger's fur. I don't find this coincidental; Hokusai's subjects are his own dilating device toward an inner actuality that magnified something elemental. Which I am now noticing blips of in the modular makeup of everything moving.

10 August 2026

Watched John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) this morning, and later my mom sent our family group chat three home movies from 1996. The first was a clip of my dad spraying a hose in the backyard of our second house. Our dog at the time—Spanky, a Border Collie—chasing the stream. Dad standing in a shadow at the edge of the yard, Spanky zigging and zagging around in the flat, pale yellow LA summer light. The camera briefly pans to my mom, who is holding a newborn Grey (then Zach) on her hip. The video is mostly ambient sound, but at the end a voice mutters something unintelligible from behind the camera. The voice doesn't belong to anyone in our family, but was (and still is) a friend.

8 August 2026

Excerpt from John Berger's essay “The White Bird” (1985):

The evolution of natural forms and the evolution of human perception have coincided to produce the phenomenon of a potential recognition: what is and what we can see (and by seeing also feel) sometimes meet at a point of affirmation. This point, this coincidence, is two-faced: what has been seen is recognized and affirmed and, at the same time, the seer is affirmed by what he sees. For a brief moment one finds oneself – without the pretensions of a creator – in the position of God in the first chapter of Genesis...And he saw that it was good. The aesthetic emotion before nature derives, I believe, from this double affirmation.

Yet we do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live – if one follows the biblical sequence of events – after the Fall. In any case, we live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope. That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe. I try to describe as accurately as possible the experience in question; my starting point is phenomenological, not deductive; its form, perceived as such, becomes a message that one receives but cannot translate because, in it, all is instantaneous. For an instant, the energy of one's perception becomes inseparable from the energy of the creation.

6 August 2026

Core: a painting that began after seeing an apple core on the ground by the Thames in Woolwich. Bent, warped, dried, bitten, twisted, chewed, skeletal, discarded. Bending up and down. And serving as a housing for some small insects. Brilliant yellow-orange-red gradient, from left to right. Its stem hovered off the pavement, but the tip was bent into a right angle at the end as if it had hit the ground first whenever it fell from whatever hand was holding it.

At midnight on Friday, one of the flats in the blocks just on the other side of our backyard fence burned down. There were some crackling sounds and pops, a woman yelled “what have you done,” a small family rushed out of the front door, and the place exploded. Hono and I watched in silence from my room as an alarm wailed, glass shattered, flames danced up stairs, windows became incandescent, and a cloud of black smoke mushroomed into the night sky.

4 August 2026

Discovered Pati Hill (1921-2014) last week and her work has been sustaining me since. What a great artist. To anyone reading this: I would recommend Baptiste Pinteaux's essay on the occasion of her 2020 exhibition Heaven’s door is open to us / Like a big vacuum cleaner at Air de Paris for a good background rundown. Her writing and poems are lovely, and I'll have to get into that part of her oeuvre separately (though they are often attached to her images). But for now—noting her photocopy artworks (of objects fed to the copier from the daily detritus of her housewife life) that I have up in the studio right now:

Untitled (petals) (1980) Untitled (broken glass and dragonflies) (1990) Untitled (jabot) (1976) Untitled tryptych (1980-83) Untitled (fur coat) (1976) Untitled (note: the one of black ovals over white) (1980) Untitled (Swan's wing) (1978)

There's so much to say when I have more than one brain cell wiggling around (it's very late as I write this), but this is vital work that carries both condition and projection in a singularly non-dual yet still stratified way; I don't know that I've ever come across work that conveys such immediacy while simultaneously implying such distance and/or detachment. Her method is unflinching and endlessly generative, a defiant wellspring examining everything felt under the threat of life unlived.

2 August 2026

“The Caterpillar And The Moth”—Pati Hill (1979)

Caterpillar to Moth: I thought you were a leaf. I dreamed of you falling past me. I thought of your wings beating And of my many feet.

Moth to Caterpillar: I thought of you. I thought you were a thought. I thought you thought a dream. I thought I thought. I thought I thought I thought.

31 July 2026

Visited Tobias's studio ahead of our upcoming conversation for the podcast and got to spend some time with the body of work he has been developing (he showed me nine paintings made over what I believe he said was the past eight or nine months). It's excellent, inspiring work, so I'm getting some notes down here.

Firstly, gridding; these paintings establish a conversation with gridding that isn't so much a system as it is an ongoing set of suggestions around the reactions a system might imply and/or cause. A—let's say roughly nine—quadrant grid is repeatedly alluded to and yet never exists as a graspable solid framework. Even in one work where the quadrants are quite forward, hard-edged, and visible, their form-defining borderlines tilt, skew, echo, and overlap such that the effect is something like pieces of paper strewn around a flat surface or windows containing ranges of seasonal or emotional states. In fact, (and I know I'm prone to bringing him up), I sense something of Jasper Johns's Seasons (1987) etching and aquatint works (and the totality of his work more broadly speaking) in these paintings in that form seems to be mostly utilized and dilated to open the door for focus to constantly shift and for something else to appear on the surface. And that something else might hint at locatable subjects, (in working titles and early associative thoughts, Tobias mentioned words like “reservoir” and “diesel,” and I do sense a kind of lingering omnipotent/omnipresent noxiousness), but ultimately passes them by as it moves around in search of new formal relationships to unpack. It's not purely formal work, but it understands its way in.

Tobias mentioned Manet with regard to his ability to deploy structures around figures that create a certain leeway for perhaps more experimental whims or marks to feel justified within those structures, and I get what he means while looking at his work (although he also spoke of confronting limitations, and I think Manet's were ultimately the cause of some of his weirder and more spatially confounding and therefore more timeless paintings). But in Tobias's case, as I've already alluded to, I think his freedom unlocks from manipulating the structure itself. And therein lies a sort of twisting of subject into content and back again that makes the work generative and fresh. In paintings beyond the aforementioned most delineated one, the grid collapses, rotates, curls, disintegrates, compresses, duplicates, and glitches. In these ways, one of the main elements being constantly negated is rigidity. Which is further enforced by the mostly pale, subdued, often muddy, deceptively gentle palette. I say deceptively because the work doesn't read as gentle to me, but it does read as unified by a considered sensitivity.

More thoughts to come, but that's a start.

29 July 2026

“The General” by Bernadette Mayer, from The Old Style Is Finding out Something about a Whole New Set of Possibilities (1966-70)

Later in secret Later in secret the general Bends to remove something To lean against a fresco. The rules which run Around the walls The walls of court Determine a course, Declare if he had not:

Sulphur and pitch, sulphur and lead, sulphur and gum mastic, sulphur and varnish, mixed with the husks of pine-kernels, sawdust, isinglass, shells of snails, husks of beans, and seed of myrtle.

From here any direction is shown. The woods must be razed — resumption of growth The market growing, profusion, the question To hold — to hold Parts or acts in the act of disintegrating wholly. A sign over the hull — the evening In a complex of other evenings Behind the intervening ledge, the general.

27 July 2026

The father of one of my friends is battling a terminal diagnosis and is nearing the end of his life; at the time of my writing this, it's entirely possible that he's no longer with us. Today, as I began the process of organizing and packing my things to move across the world again, I found a small folded rectangle of paper he gave me when he visited my studio a little less than a year ago as a prompt to stay in touch. One side of the paper, (the part visible as its exterior when folded, like a book cover), is decorated with a repeating pattern of uniform pale gold line-drawn isosceles triangles fit snugly together like puzzle to create an optical illusion of movement (like a mid-60s Bridget Riley screenprint). When the piece of paper is unfolded, neatly handwritten information appears in black ink in three stacked lines, each line offset to create a stair effect (ascending from left to right or descending from right to left). A perfectly symmetrical arrangement with the crease from the fold as its axis. The top line is his name, the middle line his email address, and the bottom line the website of a workshop he founded that he suggested I attend someday.

25 July 2026

Visitors (working title): a small 8x10 inch painting of what began from seeing a peeling decorative vinyl house address number I saw on a Wood Green recycling bin. Became a kind of totem upright in the night (memories of standing at the base of Sankaty Head Light). Or a garden and a butterfly, or a fake garden and a projection of a butterfly, or two visitors trying to mirror each other (when done with intent, mirroring can be an important part of developing business relationships...), or embodied experience shifting into two dimensions (less time with the act, more with the storage). Serendipitously found a wax seal on an old envelope as the impulse to add an insect in flight arrived (it really helps to keep anything and everything around; ideas don't die but they do like to hide). Yena said she has been writing about seeing cicada shells on the ground during walks in her neighborhood. I could also say that this work feels like childhood revisited with new tools, or a compressed and frozen metamorphosis, or a record of an imprinting. So content is coming around (by which I mean I'm not even considering it anymore), but I feel that the materiality needs to hurry up and dissolve. I'll let this one stand regardless—it's an okay waypoint and painting is logrolling.

“As a very young man he had spoken of his art as “andacht zum kleinen” (devotion to small things). In the Microcosm of his own visual world he worshipped the Macrocosm of the universe. This was his revolution.” – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy on Paul Klee in the introduction to Praeger Publishers' 1972 print of his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).

Sharon sent me Carlo Carrà's painting L’amante dell'ingegnere (The Engineer’s Lover) (1921) and said both my work and his gives her a sense of arrangement and perhaps a musicality, which was wonderful. Painting as arrangement/an arrangement. Which also makes me want to re-consider modularity in approach.