view23 August 2025
Looks like you (working title): the main focal point—bird and its shadow—handled delicately such that detail/form is present but nearly imperceptible as it's only implied by brushtrokes. That one element is working well enough to not really need anything around it to muck it up, so I just washed around it in white and the question became whether or not more could be had from a supporting cast. The white adds a nice contrast and another level of abstraction that frames the bird and shadow with an almost dog-hand-shadow shape, which I must admit I love. But it somehow still feels kind of empty. Thinking of the ongoing conversation with Jonathan around how negative space should ideally be in service of something. But maybe we don't always need to be aware of what it may or may not be serving.
view21 August 2025
Image inventory: monolithic black men's room partition in Reykjavík–Keflavík Airport, receding airplane windows from the outside, airplane engine, security camera couple, charity shop shelving, black cat pausing before crossing over the shadow of a street lamp, Sistine ceiling, bird looking at (possibly trying to intimidate) its shadow, front patio DIY Stonehenge made out of bricks, sock on a fence, hat covered in wet orange leaves, finch sunning its wings, Yena floating above a tree in a reflected hotel bed, man carrying a human-sized cross through Carnival, Max and a squirrel meeting on the mound at Yankee Stadium.
view19 August 2025
W.S. Merwin on the plane—Yena's copy of his collection Garden Time, written (partly dictated to his wife) when he was losing his eyesight in his 80s. Simple, visceral, stark, gentle, clear, like I can fit my body in the space between the words. Brought to mind the minimal album art of Masayoshi Fujita's Bird Ambience, a letter “i” broken down into the relations between its constituent components. Or Donald Judd's 100 untitled works in mill aluminum (1982–1986). Light, reflection, darkness, space, shadow, clarity, contrast, time all and all time.
view17 August 2025
Orbital set: a solid, robust subject handled with restraint in thin washes is a good premise, but that can't be the whole thing, and I think this one successfully transcended it. What introduced itself was an extreme flattening, something that gave it the feeling of a 2D film set background, yet still implied a cyclical motion, a living quality. Which might have to do with the buzz of the layers—watercolor, two layers of loose but thick vertical touches, a layer of thin washy vertical lines, and a final application of vertical pencil. All of that clashing with the horizontal grain is fun. An effect I'm aiming to expand on in a new one (placeholder title Stand-in—focused on a fenced-in wood cutout of a body wearing a high-vis vest and construction gear based on a site I saw near Blackheath while visiting Gavin).
view15 August 2025
Saw Morandi's work for the first time at the Vatican in the room dedicated to his work. Spent the most time with one of the drawings (can't remember the exact year and it isn't listed on the Vatican's website, but it was a later period one) and two of the still life paintings: Natura morta (1943) and Natura morta italiana (1957). These works alone hold the span of his inquiry and contribution. The former feels like a more or less traditionally handled still life (at least by his standards), but the latter (hung on the adjacent wall, seen first upon entering the space) is thinner, less layered, more loosely handled, and to me more playful—the gray oval representing the inside of the tallest vessel in the composition floats above a table of the same shape and color; the vessels as wireframes in the way they are so well known in his work. Which is even more evident in the aforementioned drawing, which remains almost like a bead maze even with prolonged looking. To my memory, his work was the only work in the contemporary part of the museum's collection that wasn't overtly religious in subject matter, yet his devotion is so palpable that it feels right at home in that context.
view13 August 2025
The intensity of Michelangelo's The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was unlike anything I've ever experienced. The same can be said for the ceiling, but I'm just going to focus on that fresco for now. The sheer humanity of it. A writhing procession of flesh. Flesh is the first word that came to mind when I walked into the room—the way the flesh is handled as the eye descends from the saved in heaven to the damned in hell is a masterfully subtle gradation as the eye travels, but a stark contrast when the piece is taken in as a whole; the bodies in heaven are luminous and lightened, while the devils and hell-bound figures have greyed, darkened, filthy-looking flesh. It's a logical, perhaps inevitable, yet still ineffable effect.
I was also struck by how the gears of the piece rotate through figures and forms acting as links between realms—there are many, but what comes to mind first is the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew that sags toward the figure becoming aware of his own damnation, who is being dragged into hell by a devil plunging through the air by the weight of the black shadow wrapping his back. This sequencing is an example of how the painting's connective tissue hides in plain sight. It's uncanny in how its spaciousness is jam-packed; sky and clouds suspend its 300+ figures to create an atmosphere that flattens the whole scene into a cohesive tidal wave while still stretching negative space into an all-encompassing container.
But back to the humanity. I recognize that I'm arriving at this outlook from a privileged perspective given how little organized religion has impeded my personal freedoms, but to me the depicted dichotomy between the two afterlives immediately felt first and foremost like a representation of the full possible spectrum of human emotion and sensory experience. From the mystical wonder of spiritually fulfilled souls to the tormented anguish of those doomed by never having served a purpose beyond themselves, I found it to be remarkably rooted in this physical world. Pope John Paul II called the work a “sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” which rings true—the mashed mass of bodies left a brain-like imprint on my memory, almost like each limb was a gyrus coalescing into as complete a picture of consciousness as I've ever encountered.
view11 August 2025
Inventory: Intercoursal bodies, waves, eight-legged organisms, trees, pools, mushrooms, shadows, pigeons, Air Force oath renewal family photo circa 1963 (American flag in the background), reflections in silverware, braiding hair, pen out of ink, hand out of pen, forests, lumberjacks, chips, cuts, cracks, voyeuristic compositions, arrows, wet leaves, holding hands, buzzed hair, cameras, interviews, blood on rocks.
view9 August 2025
Victor Hugo—Taches with fingerprints (1865). A threshold and a hiding and an emergence and a gathering/populating all in one. Pure. Very close to what I am hoping to achieve right now.
view7 August 2025
I would like drawing and painting to fold in on themselves, to struggle for position in a blurred hierarchy. Not drawing with paint, though that's cool. I mean drawing with graphite—interesting when an impermanent material is used in a context that makes it feel permanent. Next to oil paint faces all manner of threats to its purity/existence.
view5 August 2025
In her Brooklyn Rail talk from 2021, Katherine Bradford says Robert Motherwell taught her that color and line were enough, but she also shows a Susan Rothenberg to talk about how the inclusion of a subject, (in Rothenberg's case a horse), augments those formal elements so they're in service of emotion. Have had these ideas top of mind while working on what is currently titled Pre-stake—a tree trunk with an incision or chunk chipped out represented as a kind of abstract red blog, its shape nodding to Holbein's Ambassadors (1533) and Kerry James Marshall's School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). There's also a bird passing through and sky alluded to incompletely on either side of the trunk. Bradford also talked about making her way through paintings by accumulating formal decisions, and my recent process feels similar. Not an obscuring of the subject, but a way to use it as a container to ask painting questions. So Pre-stake seems an okay title—addressing the moment before something is asserted, set in stone, penetrated in a permanent way. The tree perhaps about to tip, the bird in transit, the forms solid enough to exist but sheer enough to dissolve at a particular vantage.