view9 December 2025
Looking at a lot of Dürer this week. It's amazing how fresh and contemporary the work he did five hundred years ago feels to my eyes. The depth of his attention is evergreen. Seeing beyond seeing. Thought of his Christ as the Man of Sorrows (1492) while walking through Heathrow Terminal 3 when I passed by what I assume is an advertisement for Rio de Janeiro/Brazil tourism: a long, horizontal, textless image of the top half of Christ the Redeemer (1931) stretched across a cloudless blue sky. In Dürer's painting, the Christ figure is leaning on a foregrounded ledge, the plane between subject and viewer both established and broken. In the airport, the vinyl advertisement isn't bordered by any frame or support and fits quite seamlessly into the cold, glossy environment around it. Gliding by it on a moving walkway made for a strange sensation where each arm seemed to extend from the wall one at a time as I passed. This melding of perceptual planes via a figure actively stretching the confines of its medium is something I'm holding as I sit down to sketch what I'm seeing.
view7 December 2025
In the living room at my parents' place in the sky (18th floor) in Marina del Rey, glass white clouds bright gray, sheer heather curtain, blue glass angled refraction, purple glass shaker aluminum wood L's grain polished scratches, cream angles gray velvet, metal riveted orange glow floating frame, faces fragmented matte nylon mounted cool jeweled memory frames, glasses coffee table brushed aluminum olive textile carpet jeans draped, woven tufted selvedge denim shadow thrown cross warped window drop water bubble gland, wrist hand rested cream alarm vented black white gray wax orchid iron suspension checker, twist ring ninety pounds ink 05 08 seated circles, orange gold round arched fitted pressed braided capped, arranged melded signed signature, folded drying clicking, distant satellite smog crawlers breeze through street plane blue light blue sky blue mirrored bird mirror metallic love pretty pink speaker.
view5 December 2025
“...go to a place (be invited for instance)
have impressions there
take things from the places where you have impressions (take really or mentally) bulbs from lamps, candy from stores, symbols from visions in dreams, symbols from visions in places, colors from clothes, colors from faces, colors from memory, colors from hope, colors from disgust
make (as many as time allows, invitation allows, health allows, walls want, you want, people want) flat things (pictures) out of the taken things
copy them photographically, make portraits of them, describe them, make remarks about them, divide them, alter them, keep them, give them
have machines doing the same for you, more for you, more for somebody else, more for themselves make pictures out of things, feelings, visions, remarks, accidents which come from those pictures
make (at any time) a pile from the pictures you like, somebody likes, certain people like, nobody likes
and bind them as a book...”
—Dieter Roth (from Offhand Design, 1975)
view3 December 2025
Image inventory (from memory): the base of a few plant stalks in the square pot on my parents' coffee table, a Christ the Redeemer advertisement in Terminal 3 at Heathrow, satellites on top of a building, light coming through an airplane window fragmenting in six directions, a man next to me on an airplane wearing a turquoise shirt leaning his head against the seat in front of him (turquoise-tinted windows behind him), raindrops in puddles on the street splintering a reflected streetlight, a billboard of a tan man wearing jeans on the beach with his back turned, a jungly coffee shop entrance (plants crawling all over the walls), clouds that look like a figure sleeping on its side.
view1 December 2025
Finding ways to stay in motion is becoming helpful toward honing focal endurance. I savor what I see when I may never see it again, and there's something about the impossibility of parsing each day's avalanche of visual stimuli that makes trying to do so a creatively fertile place to start work from. Because the digestion is happening regardless—someone at the open studio asked if I had seen One Battle After Another before I painted On diversion, and indeed I had (it appears the hilly car chase scene got in there). The effect of here it comes and there it goes, again and again, each oscillation distinct from the last and yet sequenced, is something I keep coming back to.
view29 November 2025
Today is the first time I've been aware of a creative cycle seemingly closing its loop in a way that feels akin to releasing an album. Or maybe an EP is more accurate, as the by-product was only four paintings. And the first of those was resolved around October 18th, so they're from a relatively short window—less than two months. In that time I completed ten paintings that I at least considered sharing at one point or another, but six of them ultimately didn't have the legs. A body of work...
What is important to note is how those two months feel more fully formed as a period of inquiry than any other period of artistic output that I've been through. This probably has to do with a number of factors, but protecting and maintaining my attention within my privacy seems chief among them. I've plotted out my points of material, aesthetic, and conceptual research regularly here, so I won't get into all of that right now. I mainly want to notice what it feels like to have been fully engaged in the natural stages of making and showing, from the seeds of a set of ideas to their resolution to sharing them with a wider audience.
Since that sharing, (first via my open studio and then to my community via online channels and outreach to interested parties), I've been pretty unsatisfied with what I've made since getting back to work in the past few days. I think that has to do with how hardened my understanding of my work feels in this moment; as much as I try to put what I'm doing into words here, the time developing my work in my studio before sharing it is not explainable, rational, or logical. The best choices made in my own painting are focused, yes, but not on coherent thought. They are made from a lightness, a delighted joy in the what-ifs that swirl around in the mind during a state of play-centric flow. So the time spent exporting the work into digestible language (in public conversation, grant/art prize applications, etc.) is basically the opposite state. It's an unavoidable part of the process of course, so this is not a lament. It's just a way of telling myself how much more can be done to sharpen the ability to toggle between those modes.
view27 November 2025
There's an interview with Richard Walker around the time of his 2012 exhibition House Paintings where he talks about the process of making the work in the show during a residency at The Haining house in Selkirk:
I started to light the rooms with a projector and lamps, to create shapes, or to obscure things, And another aspect was that I’m often thinking how to use photography, or what the relationship is in my work to photography; using photographs as light rather than a printed image is interesting. I had photographs of the landscape around the house and I started projecting those into the dark rooms. So I was shutting it out, but putting it back in, in another way. And then I began even taking photos of the interiors and projecting them back on to themselves with maybe a slight shift in alignment.
Have been thinking about this a lot on the heels of what I mentioned in my last post here about finding myself being drawn to reflections recently. I think Walker gets at what I have been beginning to attempt to articulate, which is a desire to find a way to work from deeply attentive and faithful observation while still considering a fracturing and fragmentation of perception in the process.
view25 November 2025
I see Parmigianino's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524) on the cover of John Ashbery's poetry collection of the same name every day—it's on a shelf in my studio. Revisiting that painting and the collection's titular poem (1974) today, as both feel relevant to a kind of visual simultaneity I am pursuing. Reflections in particular are becoming interesting, but not for stylistic reasons (I've photographed a lot of them for reference, but in the vast majority of them their visual warping is a trap). The kind I'm referring to are those that recontextualize and sharpen their environments from obscured vantages, subtly hinting at the ever-changing nature of space. A chunk of the aforementioned Ashbery poem could help here:
”...Francesco, your hand is big enough
To wreck the sphere, and too big,
One would think, to weave delicate meshes
That only argue its further detention.
(Big, but not coarse, merely on another scale,
Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom
In relation to the tiny, self-important ship
On the surface.) But your eyes proclaim
That everything is surface. The surface is what's there
And nothing can exist except what's there.
There are no recesses in the room, only alcoves,
And the window doesn't matter much, or that
Sliver of window or mirror on the right, even
As a gauge of the weather, which in French is
Le temps, the word for time, and which
Follows a course wherein changes are merely
Features of the whole. The whole is stable within
Instability, a globe like ours, resting
On a pedestal of vacuum, a ping-pong ball
Secure on its jet of water.
And just as there are no words for the surface, that is,
No words to say what it really is, that it is not
Superficial but a visible core, then there is
No way out of the problem of pathos vs. experience.
You will stay on, restive, serene in
Your gesture which is neither embrace nor warning
But which holds something of both in pure
Affirmation that doesn't affirm anything.”
view23 November 2025
“My life is a process of generating hope.” – Chuquimamani-Condori
view21 November 2025
Moon/pink (working title), or maybe Rudder: today's Oblique Strategies advised “infinitesimal gradations,” which is timely—this is a painting of the moon or sun in the London winter sky made with many thin layers of white tinted by various intensities of red and blue. Tried to make the difference in the tints as subtle as possible, George Tooker's embossed inkless intaglios in mind. This toward defamiliarizing and holding anew the scene hovering above that has become so familiar in the past three years. Following the details of sensation right now above all else, paying attention to their peaks and valleys, trying to relax into circling around their elusive core.