view28 May 2026
Began an 8x10” painting today, a plume of smoke on a ledge redux. After trying to work with it a few months ago, I came back to the image I still remember from when I visited Rob's studio in Sag Harbor and he showed me an acid-yellow work that featured the same subject. It's a beautiful idea, an explosion confined to a container in a quiet room (and no one is around to hear it...). I think I already prefer this one to my initial attempt, firstly for the size—the implication of large-scale destruction works better small. Christopher Culver's charcoal and pastel drawing Octobers (2025) of a white bird in flight approaching a domestic windowsill to land has been tacked up in my studio while I've been working on this one. For the lovely color harmonies, but also because I think there is a lot to be learned from him about subtle texturing of monochromatic space. There's also a tonal parallel to the content; alarming, aggressive action framed and frozen into a kind of tranquility.
view26 May 2026
Have been spending a lot of time looking at Paul Klee's Strange Garden (1923), a watercolor on gessoed fabric mounted on cardboard, flora and fauna and mask-faces woven together by line and color and texture. A quilted feeling almost, but not patchwork. A scene both stacked and embedded in such a nice way. Basically every month or so, a new work of his gets stuck next to wherever I'm storing what I see. This one has come along at the right time; it does everything my studio seems to be trying to make possible at the moment. Establishes a kind of fundamental soil that the image and the feeling and the memory all grow from together and hover over at the same time. A condition that allows for forms to remain abstract in relation to what they comprise while threatening the opposite. But I'm also wary of thinking of that too much as an end while working. Or thinking about that at all. It's just an enjoyable place to begin right now.
view24 May 2026
Stadium (working title): in Hastings we walked around an arcade, and there was a claw machine filled with hundreds of shiny golden eggs. A disorienting sea of metallic surfaces and reflected neon. One particular egg was angled towards another game in the room, a basketball one I think—a structure contained by netting, which burst open and stretched out like arms in the convex reflection. Pieces of that image bounced around the rest of the pile, but none cohered into anything as loud as the scene in/on that single egg. Tried to paint that. Handled the paint pretty well and felt good about the surface preparation and color, but nothing of interesting note transpired. And it veered a little too close to the kind of correctness via highlight painting that I despise. I’m aiming to go softer and softer into the recesses of forms, but part of me is still holding on to hard edges and I need to let go of them. So this one will probably meet its maker, but may be reconstituted elsewhere. Regardless, it did feel nice to move paint around again after traveling for a few days.
view22 May 2026
A painting: that is maybe 80-90% logically sequenced but with relief-printed elements introduced at one point in the process and reacted to, with forms delineated entirely with dashes, of a measured and almost illustrated flat environment containing one shape that becomes the lone source of depth, of a flattened scene that nonetheless attempts to adhere to the logic of atmospheric perspective in spite of itself, of a materially fluid orbiting scene that stops short of penetrating a central void space (white), of an activated axis like a melon cut in half and presented as a whole, of the light of death as a very small thing.
view20 May 2026
Upper crust (working title): rubber ducks becoming animated towards a source/void. That began as a plug. I've been pretty stuck on a Graham Little gouache on paper painting from 2021 of a squirrel called Untitled (Squirrel) this week. Apparently he found a dead squirrel while cycling and kept it in his freezer for three years.
In the work the animal is on the left of the composition encircled by its own tail, peacefully at some kind of rest. There's a transparent triangle shape floating over or on part of the squirrel, looks like something cut out from one of those geometry templates required for high school math classes. It's connected by two thin lines pulled taut across the work that criss-cross into a little cluster of smaller triangles connected to tiny trompe-l'oeil nails; the effect is something like miniature barricade tape. Then just above those, there are sort of clumsily calligraphic marks that wind their way up to an ornamental glass object with a pine cone looking head that might be a stirrer or needle or pin. The feeling of the whole thing is something close to what I remember from seeing the Pietà in Rome. Delicacy in death. That's a heck of a comparison, I know, but it's the first thing that came to mind. Dürer's watercolors of animals too, of course.
Anyway, these ducks I went for were not destined for that kind of accuracy. There's been a desire recently to create a kind of generative soup, boil it, and then catch the bubbles before they pop to comprise the image. But I have to be careful not to create this environment for no reason. It could be that the next one causes a counter-reaction through rendering.
view18 May 2026
Some bits to get down from the most recent courthouse crit group: containment, levels of estrangement, Hallmark card framing, octogenarian colors, Bonnard's pocket calendar, Allen Ginsberg: return to the optical, fuddy-duddy speed, head swims, I own a human skeleton, tiny canvas big brush, In the Night Kitchen, elephant-wise.
view16 May 2026
Saw the Duchamp show at MoMA while I was in New York. Master puppeteer, seems like he operated with such an unfathomably wide top-down view of his context that he transcended it entirely. A pretty amazing feeling to walk chronologically through the unmatchably rigorous, curious, and poetic path he charted. I got the sense that his constant iterating on the forms he obsessed over was his way of rotating them around a kind of internalized examination axis to spatially project and then destabilize their measurable characteristics. Which generated a metaphysical language that allowed him to endlessly probe how objects relate to each other and to us as seeing and sensing bodies. In space, in time, in the imagination. And that language, seen in its entirety, felt surprisingly generous. I think because it was always pointed inward. Used to satisfy something that may have manifested as a disruption because of how original it was, but was meant to expand rather than sabotage. That's a long way of saying he was ahead of his time and was graceful in proving/sharing that.
Some personal favorite moments: one of his small Rotoreliefs—cerulean blue/white/a kind of tangerine orange, the central form a hook-shaped line-drawn half light bulb with dashes shooting off of it as implied light rays. Delicate, alive, absent of the thing it represents yet conjuring it all the same. And a 1956 small ink drawing of a jacket on two pieces of what looked like transparent tracing paper, his tiny handwritten name on the topmost piece floating over the space representing where the name tag would be on the bottom piece. The inner lining of the jacket represented by grids drawn on to that same bottom layer—simple suspension, non-duality in one choice. To say nothing of the Swift Nudes (escaping, illuminating, darting, receding). The dynamism exceeded my expectations, and they were lofty.
view14 May 2026
Paul Thek @ Galerie Buchholz (NY): didn't get to make the big Pace show because it wasn't open on the one day I had free to walk around, but I'm guessing it had the lion's share of the good stuff. Even so, it was worth seeing for the new-to-me 1973 series of collaborative collages he made with Ann Wilson. I believe there were five of them, each organized around a central triangle shape. One filled with a cloudy blue sky that bled into a bird form, another filled with gold leaf, another framing a sea horizon. Diaristic in approach and feeling, lyrics (Beatles) and sections of religious texts scrawled along the edges of the triangles or floating around them, line drawings of animals cut out and dropped in here and there (a sheep with the words “kiss me” next to its face). Refreshing in its playfulness, a collaborative game. Felt like two friends trying to out-mantra each other. Perhaps they resonated with me because of the “inscrutable spiritual symbol” stuff I've been trying my hand at (as described by Jonathan). Also enjoyed the two 1975 “Untitled (Grapes)” newspaper paintings. Done seemingly so “correctly” (and directly), but handled with such an abundant and loose hand that they break down in the good way on close inspection. In one of them, a moment where the thick green vine squiggles part like curtains to reveal a shape that looks like a curling cartoon shrub underneath.
view12 May 2026
Tethering (working title): revisited the bench subject, as my first attempt didn't really do it for me in the end when I got fresh eyes on it yesterday. As nice as the worked-in color was optically, there's just something about the physical quality of really thick, built-up paint that I'm repelled by in my own work (not in the work of others who do it well, to be clear). I guess it has something to do with preserving intentionality, lightness of touch, sensitivity, etc. Anyway, iterating on/coming back to subjects has been something of a game changer for me; something that being in my own space surrounded by my reoccurring thoughts has catalyzed. Slowly getting over the disappointment that accompanies an idea that doesn't reach its potential and learning to take instructions from it on new iterations instead. This time I focused a lot more on repetitive touch and constant subtraction, reminded me a bit of how it felt to handle the paint that made Destruction as well as building—never letting it settle or cover too much space, always making more marks and negating those marks over and over again. This one does feel like it got pretty close to something inherent to the visually disorienting quality that made the bench's anatomy appealing in the first place, but I gave it a border that ended up connecting to the bench's rail in a similar way to the last time I tried, which felt a bit gimmicky. But that could possibly be negated as well with a simple bisecting line in pencil or a slight tweak in the transition from the border to the rail, so we'll see if it can be resolved. A lasting image of Max Keene's wonderful piece World Dance (2025) has been going around the city with me in my mind this week.
view10 May 2026
Tethering
The holes in my socks hovered over my bedroom floor
covered in sun-
faded loops of brown carpet.
it had been a while since I watered my only houseplant,
I didn't realize
because it was still green—you reminded me
so I grabbed the water gun
to feed it in time
the mist was tiny then suddenly everywhere
like you