view21 December 2025
Terminal advertisement (working title): a painting put into action today based on seeing that aforementioned Brazil tourism ad of Christ the Redeemer while on a moving walkway on my way through Heathrow. There's something emerging in the studio about the reconstruction of particular moments of seeing that I hope is beginning to stretch beyond the full stop stillness I have (subconsciously) tried to capture in the past. And I think it has to do with identifying imagistic planes that somehow relate to the multiplicity of specific lived sensations. In the recall of the kinds of scenes I'm inclined to paint, I'm finding—through photos, sketches, and memory—that there becomes a kind of 360 degree inventory of phenomena that holds possible planar ingredients. And while I don't want to fall into the trap of manufacturing those ingredients, I do think they are worth noticing. In Flat window, they were represented by a combination of perceptions related to reflections, barriers, borderlines, and changes in light that became essentially a sequence of transparencies to layer on top of one another toward a hybrid image.
In this painting today, it seemed like the phenomena were less distinct and perhaps manifested more as a melding of planes rather than a separating and layering of them. I think I can trace this to the experience of seeing the advertisement itself: the micro shifts in fluorescent light bouncing off of the vinyl image as I passed it, the ambiguous tonal environment around it that seemed to blend into a big neutral goop, seeing the seams between each vinyl panel and then losing them again—those were the bits of recall that became planar and then united in shapelessness, the Christ figure a strangely warping and beckoning bit of solidity swimming in and around them.
view19 December 2025
Green wood
Let's go see the wild berries at the pub
and the trash at the courtyard for
the stone cracking sideways in the rain
we can share bread with gnomes
hurrying their way back to families
no stopping to think about it later and later
when we met we stepped in a bucket
a crow cocked its dream around your neck
and into the underpass flew pleasure
view17 December 2025
It's becoming clear that my process outside of the studio is just as important as inside it. I guess that has always been the case, but it's glaring now—the difference in the quality of work I create when I allow myself the space to cycle through the natural stages of a seed of inquiry sprouting organically versus just hard-headed, research-oriented hammering away is obvious. Painting is about striving to live with such fullness of experience and such attention to detail that the work becomes inevitable, because to hold it would be to block a vital passageway. If there's an appropriate balance of making and living, then the work itself will be alive.
view15 December 2025
So much of what I've been working through recently has had to do with reconciling seeing while in motion with the fact of paintings as inherently stable and framed objects. Thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to turn that on its head and see if I could approach an image in the opposite way. That is, seeing something that is normally in motion through a stable lens, maybe even an indifferent or exclusionary one. Thought of Peter Saul's Yellow Car (1957) as a successful example of this line of thinking. Dovetailed nicely with all of the documenting I've been doing of cars—they're central characters right now. But that angle failed today, twice, to become a fertile bed for anything interesting. Might have to do with a misguided intention, a way of seeing that is trying too hard to prove itself as implicit.
view13 December 2025
Another significant bit in the New Models podcast episode mentioned in the previous post was Allado-McDowell's mention of Edward Steichen's landmark photography exhibition The Family of Man (first shown in 1955) as an early example of a “multi-channel environment” in which, due to its dynamic installation, a viewer could in theory produce their own subjectivity via the way they chose to navigate the presentation. This led to further conversation on how media constructs physical space as well as information—the television gathering people in a living room. Naturally this led me to think about paintings as organizers of space, information, and subjectivity. There's room to push this further in my work, maybe experiment with a more tenuous approach to cohering my spatial recordings, see how far they can bend before they break. David Salle immediately comes to mind as a potential tangential relation.
view11 December 2025
At one point in the episode of the New Models podcast with K. Allado-McDowell (from 2024), one of the hosts (which appears to be the artist Daniel Keller) mentions how despite human vision spanning 180 degrees, it doesn't distort like a lens, but rather it flattens. This was in the context of a conversation revolving around Allado-McDowell's theorization of what they term “neural media” and how one of its defining characteristics is that its content is hallucinated. Anyone reading this should go listen to the episode for a deeper unpacking of what they mean by this and how they think about hallucination with respect to the user/consumer and neural media itself. It's a fascinating subject.
But the eye's flattening implying hallucination is less interesting to me than the act of its flattening itself, especially as it relates to painting—what I've been working on recently seems like it is dealing with flatness more directly than any of my previous work. A new painting, titled Flat window (Wandsworth) (working title) is an exercise in compression; of planes that can perhaps be traced to my body in space while walking on a sidewalk through Wandsworth, a car passing by me on the road, ambient light changing as the sun went down, seeing a reflection of said car passing in the window of a flat I was walking by, and seeing beyond that reflection into a fragment of the interior of the flat. Painting as a node.
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.