view1 March 2026
Found a £5 National Lottery “£500 Loaded” scratchcard on the ground near Wood Green station (not a winner; apparently the odds are around 1 in 1,400 to win the full £500, meaning you'd have to spend over £7k on scratchcards for a statistical guarantee). Those things are like mini paintings, the topmost layer clawed away to reveal the information hidden underneath. Which is why I picked it up—it's a potent feeling to find and hold such a clear recording of a stranger's touch in your hands. The rhythm of the diagonal scratch marks (this person was probably right-handed) held the urgent speed of them. Spooked me a little, honestly. The palpable charge of hope turning to disappointment. And yet there was something undeniably alive about it. It had been addressed with someone's undivided attention at one point. Going to see if I can make a drawing with one.
view27 February 2026
Spread (working title): found a stack of old Polaroids over the weekend that I hadn't looked at in probably a year, and instantly there was a freshness to their format from a painting perspective—the image as a container being contained. Thought of Marisol's 1961 Family Portrait lithograph, of approaching and reacting to the edges of the source and going from there. Ken price too, value absolutes and the neat/organized but skillfully loose layered application in so many of his small ink and acrylic drawings/paintings. The photograph I worked with was of a scene of surfaces supporting half-emptied glasses and bottles at Yena's old flat in Vauxhall. The pheromone-thick air of that night, one of many nights, and the edges on which the images in those memories balance.
view25 February 2026
Using much more printed material as reference/source material this week. And it's finding me—yesterday on my walk back from Jake's studio, I found two laminated print-outs in the street. Both were facedown before I flipped them over to find what was on the other side. One is a handwritten description in waterlogged ink on A6 white paper of a species of tree that is apparently common in Southwark, and next to the description are six purple and mustard-yellow flowers pressed flat between the laminate, each at the center of their own oozing bleed of yellow color that rain has extracted from them. The other is a children-appropriate bingo card on A4 white paper, the bingo squares comprised of low-poly digital renderings of smiling local animals. There's a black and white, sort of yin and yang-feeling logo on the bottom right of the page for a primary school that is a mirrored image of trees where the form of the trees are inverted as their roots (top half is white with black trees, bottom half is black with white roots).
view23 February 2026
Another note on visiting Eva Dixon's studio. Something that struck me was the sheer amount of variables/ingredients/raw materials/formal approaches that are in play at any given time for her to cycle through as she works on solutions for problems past and present. Of the twelve or so works in progress that she had on the wall when I came in, each was touching on problems via material that were related to yet distinctly unique from those of its neighbors. Through metal riveted and shaped, wood clamped and controlled, symmetry enhanced or threatened, images singled out/juxtaposed with another/paired with text/sliced and fragmented, light reflected/sourced from within/avoided, supports pushed and pulled, questions asked around structural integrity, interplay between frame and stretcher and surface, and inquiries into object and body, the work is in a constant state of regeneration, refreshing itself in search of what it hasn't yet tried.
view21 February 2026
Really good recently:
Traktor—EP (1995)
Bill Wells & Maher Shalal Hash Baz—Osaka Bridge (2006)
Dadamah—This Is Not a Dream (1995)
Caroline Shaw/Attacca Quartet—Orange (2019)
view19 February 2026
Re-reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man right now in small increments before I go to sleep each night. About halfway through right now. I think the rugged realism of Joyce's language and the malleability of Stephen's conscience is having a particular (but ineffable) effect on my dreams. Last night I had one in which I walked through a kind of clearing and reached a beach. From the sky to the ground, half of the beach was covered in shadow and the other half in blindingly bright light. In the light some people played volleyball, and in the shadow my father was sitting in a black hoodie with his back to me. I walked over to him, helped him up, and together we walked into the light to join the game.
view17 February 2026
Have been looking at Eliot Porter's photographic (but very painterly) work a lot this week. The relationships he finds in a thicket of trees or a cluster of fruit feels to me like the equivalent of figurative painting done right, i.e. when it is loose and expansive enough to allow mark-making and material to become the doors through which new ideas emerge from. And his treatment of color is just lovely—he manages to achieve a kind of softness in his saturation that feels less less like an artificial heightening than an organic warming.
view15 February 2026
Image inventory: a toilet sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in Camden, hand prints on a tube escalator handrail, a plane's contrail bent at an an almost right angle, a diagram of an eye that explains the different planes that comprise its lid, two gin and tonics on a table, dead flower arrangement on a park bench, eroded paint on a shed door, a fingerprint filling a square on an ID card, an oblong bench, a lion's face in a gold door knocker, an indent of a flower in blue tack, a can of peas, a red handprint on a window.
view13 February 2026
So much to say about my visit to Eva Dixon's studio. Will slowly unpack everything in time, but the first thing I want to address here is what she said about her work being propelled by not understanding it. A wonderful sentiment in itself, but but most helpful and useful to me was hearing her talk about how maintaining that headspace is a muscle she has developed and continues to train. Because it seems to me that the intellectual side of one's practice is always threatening that vital, joyful mode of working in which there is no analyzing or judging or justifying. In which the creative act justifies itself.
view11 February 2026
Missing (working title): over the past couple of months, I've seen laminated copies of the same missing cat sign pasted up all around Forest Hill. Have probably seen them in four or five separate locations. And each time I've passed them, they've become more waterlogged from the rain. So at this point they are these strange, abstracted images of the same black cat, each one warped and bent in odd directions by bleeding ink and disintegrating paper. In the most recent sighting, the black ink from the cat's back had pooled into a fold at the bottom left corner of the image, which created a right angle effect mirroring the right angle formed by the bottom of the page. Which gave it an almost ancient-Egyptian sphinx kind of feeling, rooted and at rest. Tried to honor the experience of encountering it in paint, and while it's not quite alive yet, it's also not yet dead.