Faucet Repair

23 June 2026

Saw Shao Fan's show Refrain | 复沓 at White Cube this morning—wonderful work. First time in a while that such large paintings have felt justified. Deep sensitivity in all aspects, a practice of looking and re-looking, and a lived engagement with antiquity that generates work with an intensity that truly honors his subjects both human and nonhuman. There are a few stunners, but Fruit 1924 (2024) and Rabbit Portrait 1025 (2025)—both large ink on rice paper works—are with me the most right now. Fruit has an almost paper-like two-dimensionality; it's an apple sliced in half to reveal a core that becomes a network of overlapping planes and openings. Starts to become a skull-like memento mori the longer you look at it. Rabbit manages to achieve an unflinchingly direct and confrontational quality through symmetry without locking itself off in any way (which is something that usually doesn't sit well with me)—the odd strands of hair/whiskers whimsically trail off beyond their defining limits, and certain elements like the white of the rabbit's ears remain true to the eye rather than an ideal, so my feeling is that the impressive balance comes more from an endearing emotional groundedness than a technical fastidiousness.

21 June 2026

The walls in my room at my flat are covered in Anaglypta Shelburne vinyl wallpaper. This is a catalog of markings/imperfections I can see on the south-facing wall from where I'm sitting.

A long (maybe two feet in length) and thin air pocket line snaking from halfway up the right of the wall down to the top of a stack of laundry on my floor. It actually looks just like a snake. A collapsed pocket of air, maybe six by three inches, that has cracked on top—it looks like an oyster shell beginning to open. Six subtle but visible perfectly straight vertical lines (looks like the individual panels that comprise the whole wall) spanning from ceiling to carpet. Three little blotches of what looks like dried blood, perhaps from past tenants killing mosquitos or other bugs or just getting blood on the walls somehow. Seven small holes from where people have put pins or screws in, two of which I am currently using to hang a piece of artwork (my father's sketch of a flint rock) and a bright red-bordered dollar-store mirror (the reflection is wonky from far away but accurate up close). Three more large air pockets creating a U-shape arcing up from the bottom left of the first air pocket line I mentioned—these ones are pretty flat, so they sort of disappear in lower light and I'm noticing them more now in the daylight. A long, irregular line of white paint running the length of the wall at the top near where it meets the ceiling that looks like it might be covering a messy sealing job that was done before I moved in. There's a similar line painted just above the door frame (which is embedded on the far left of the wall I'm looking at).

19 June 2026

Attempted a painting today based on the fragmented reflection of a plane on wet tarmac that I saw while boarding a recent flight from London to Venice. Primed the panel with a left-to-right gradient from a bright yellow to a dense black—the idea was to then slowly layer loose/thin form lines over the gradient from bottom to top in a relatively monochrome gray-blue palette and see what rhythms and shapes cohered as the whole thing took on a sense of motion. An okay idea, but it just didn't work, probably because it was too determined. Having a practice means constantly rewriting one's own rules, and it feels like I've done a bit of over-defining in recent days that made me rigid in my approach. So it's time for a break from the studio for a while in the interest of recalibration and refocusing.

But what I can say now, for when I resume, is that there needs to be some kind of reckoning as far as my handling of color and its relationship to the logic I've been discovering. Destruction as well as building, (while it now feels overly representative to me almost eight months later), is perhaps a good work to go back to. That one set a baseline for accumulated tactility in conjunction with early watercolor layers that are constantly shifting underneath and weaving in and out of the topmost oil layers so that there's an optical softness even with clarity of form. And when I think about the work I now want to make, which is work that is free to break away from my visual references by way of every formal element considered in a delimitation stack while still remaining true to an invisible structure of observed logic, that might be a place to restart. Forms that float, reorganize themselves and react to each other, cause friction between background and foreground as well as flatness and depth, and ultimately create a self-regenerating mesh of lived-in experience and presence. Now I'll forget everything I just said.

17 June 2026

Support (working title): some Courbet colors—Self-Portrait with a Black Dog (1842-44)—isolated and repurposed for this painting based on a lounger and a leaf that I saw outside a window with Yena in Lido. I remember the pillowy cushion bending to the empty weight of dried foliage.

I think the main organizing factory/inquiry with this one was trying to achieve a simultaneity of receding and confronting (in feeling and space), but I also ended up with something of an echo or a mirror. And a lesson in line. Worth noting to self that, as exemplified in the process for this one, I’m noticing how much more I seem to be working things out ahead of time in the drawing phase now. Of course there’s a certain (large) portion that needs to remain unknown before I begin painting to make it worth doing, but I’m also realizing more and more that I still feel fulfilled when the surprises happen earlier in my sketchbook. I suppose the most satisfying is when they happen in both phases.

Anyway, I think this one is asking some worthwhile questions and gave a good shot at fragmenting them further, but I think the color is a bit too binary still. So I think the next problem to solve has something to do with combining this more dynamic approach to line with a more interesting/nuanced/subtle approach to color so that they’re complementing each other rather than merely coexisting and the whole thing can reach a harmony that extends beyond the kinetic further into silence.

15 June 2026

Image inventory: a jagged wet reflection of a plane on a tarmac, collapsed and dismembered mannequins in an abandoned shop front window display, a group of pigeons on a sidewalk (half in light, half in shade), a marshmallow-looking lounge chair, two white doors loosely bolted together (one with covered-up graffiti in a block of gray), a phone booth with etched graffiti, a dog blurred and lunging towards a hand, dried yellow mimosa flowers on a nightstand (small dead explosion), a sliver of blue sky between two terracotta buildings with laundry lines, a white rectangle building floating on top of a full frame of ocean water, a dark cloud that looks like a face in profile over a small fluffy luminous cloud, a reflection of train seats, a small concrete sphere balancing on a brick ledge, two boats speeding through a canal towards a horizon, contrails shooting upwards out of two cut tree branches, a small red home and a small white bridge from above, rain drops in black water, wood grain three ways, pastel colored ceramic bowls at varying heights on a wood floor with dappled light, ivies encroaching on an upturned table, a yellow lost cat sign (name: Falco), shells organized by color (mostly whites and gray-blues) on a beach.

13 June 2026

Read Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953) based on his Bauhaus lectures for the first time today before getting to work and felt reinvigorated by it. Evergreen. Over time I’m planning to sit with each of its subdivisions (below, as organized by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy) in depth…

I: Line as point progression Line as planar definition Line as mathematical proportion Line as coordinator for the path of motion

II: Line as optical guide Line as optical reason Line as psychological balance

III: Line as energy projection

IV: Line as symbol of centrifugal and centripedal movement Line as symbol of will and infinity Line as symbol of color mutations and kinetic harmony

…but for today I’m noting the first principles he lays out because they’re helping me think through the spatial inquiry that’s starting to happen in my studio (the Delimitation Stacks). With the caveat that I’m trying to submerge these things after learning them as I make—their relationship to intuition feels very important to preserve.

Anyway, to begin with, I think the categorization of active, medial, and passive lines (with respect to their cause, impact, and effect) relates to what I’ve arrived at recently in thinking about the goal of an optical essence of a space as a stack (vertical for now) of independent elements, which can then be individually (and endlessly, though not aimlessly) augmented to arrive at new structures. Which, when done well, seem to point towards inner relationships. Which Klee traces to nature—how we can think of line as it relates to the rhythms, patterns, and forms of human anatomy, plans, and earth, water, and air.

And so I think what’s crucial to implementing his teachings is to internalize them to the point where I can take an “active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal,” yet still honor certain instincts of the eye as they relate to emotional honesty. The toggling of delimiters through active, medial, and passive lines can be a playful, exploratory exercise. Even the simple notion of finding a space between an active and passive plane feels like it could be generative for an entire painting—an active/passive gradient—or a single choice to move something stagnant into a more dynamic range.

11 June 2026

From last night's crit at the courthouse: foregrounded plane(s) sliding off of the background (up or down), kinetic overlay, the subject deadened then revisited then layered on top of the potent original (failed) state. Sharon brought up Calder, which seems like such a logical reference now but I admittedly need to spend more time with the work (and I will). She also made a nice point about the potential value of mixing richness built up over time with the immediacy and intentionality I'm drawn to. Which in the case of Sink relates to background and foreground, but can really be applied to any constituent element. Good fuel for moving forward.

9 June 2026

Stand (working title): something of a flattened and raised still life of the yellow mimosa flowers Yena got me a couple months ago in a vase on my nightstand. Been wanting to paint them for a while because I enjoy how they look like a small controlled explosion, but I couldn’t figure out the approach until today. Arrived at the simple idea of a volatile form rendered in a subdued palette—finding that negation of a defining characteristic often opens up possibilities, even if that negation is happening behind the scenes (perhaps especially). I suppose I must have been thinking of those Santa Maria Zobenigo marble reliefs I mentioned a couple days ago. As well as the Polaroid I took of the campfire Yena and I made in Winchester in the summer of 2024. And Duchamp's literally seminal Paysage Fautif (Wayward or Faulty Landscape) (1946) painting that I’ve had on my studio floor this week—came back from New York with one of the publications from the MoMA show. This all has to do with the surface as well, trying to find some way to divert attention from it by muting and smooshing it as much as possible while still retaining an active sense of motion and depth and change through it.

7 June 2026

Delimitation Stack

5 June 2026

Stems (working title): a painting that began today based on a wrought iron grille I saw in Venice covering a second story window with a rectangular pot full of tulips reaching towards the sun on its sill. The rails that comprised the grille were pocked with lumpy (but still pretty delicate) pale orange ornamental flowers along with some clover-looking loops, hollow yellow flower shapes, and four yellow x shapes. From far away, the black iron rails were nearly camouflaged by a black shade that was drawn behind the tulips, which made the ornamental pieces appear to float in space. I love that idea, something old and robust guarding new life while fading away. Thought of Eric Timothy Carlson’s latex on canvas Mandala painting (can't find a date for it), which is a piece I've had saved and often come back to for its ability to conjure a similar sensation. And just after I saw the grille, I encountered two fragments of a lost painting by Bellini (presumed to be a transfiguration painting; the placard read Testa di Cristo e Cartiglio, circa 1500-1502) in the Gallerie dell'Accademia. The “Cartiglio” fragment felt like a complete painting on its own to me, and it must have made its way in—I see its little scab of red paint raised above the flatness of the rest of the piece in the button-like flowers I painted today. Also must have been remembering the central stem, the way it divides yet arises from the landscape (the logic of the work as a whole seems to shift as the eye traces it from top to foreground). Not to mention the little opening in the top left, which I assume was a bit of the Christ figure’s robes but read like a slice of sky to me.