view5 November 2025
Found Charles Wright's poetry for the first time. Kindred spirit. His mind, at least in his early work (which is all I've read so far, have a ways to go) vignettes the edges of observation with a lovely kind of darkness. Born from restraint, which is key—he says his poems come from “what I see, rather than from an idea I had in mind: idea follows seeing rather than the other way around,” so that darkness is meditative, solitary, contemplative, chin to the heavens. Not gloomy. Implies an affirmation of sensation (Camus!) rather than a grasping for meaning. Pieces are noticed and arranged, organized by a hopeful and curious spirit with an ear for the kind of chance that feels inevitable. Digging “Black and Blue” (1991) right now.
view3 November 2025
“Still-Life on a Matchbox Lid” (1991) by Charles Wright
view1 November 2025
Camus, The Stranger (The Outsider here in the UK). Meursault's harmonious state is detached—self-denial cloaked in self-acceptance. He isn't doing the crucial thing of confronting futility, in his case the kind he feels under the hot sun (which reminded me of a familiar, languageless vitality I have often felt myself, especially floating in the Pacific Ocean under the California sun).
Made me think of Cézanne with regard to lucidity and vision. Been spending a lot of time with Cézanne this week. There's almost a strain that comes through from the intensity of his yearning to wrangle a force along the lines of the very thing Meursault can't accept. Even as it resists him. Which it does by nature. So the work is the attempt, the proof of care in the face of indifference.
view30 October 2025
I see a lightness (working title): like so many things I've been working on, this again feels indebted to Merlin James (at least in my head). Likely because I spent time studying his 2020 painting Night this week, trying to absorb its sepia-toned treatment, its gentle but decisive subtractive marks, the economy with which it approaches depth and distance, its tonal range and the subtlety of its transitions between contrasting values. But beyond the technical approach (which, after all, I am gleaning from reproduction), I think what also drew me to it was that I have recently become excited by the challenge that working with such vast amounts of negative space poses—what looking deeper into emptiness could do to enrich attention and observation in the work and in an audience. Stretching the panel's limits as a container. I've watched the figure disappear from my work over the past few months and now I'm watching the non-human forms that have taken its place slowly disappear too. Or just step aside. So the shadows in Yena's shower is what my own new work that I'm referencing began with. It diverged in a useful way, mainly when some shapes I was going to initially anchor the bottom of the composition with dropped out, which gave the whole thing a lovely suspended, void-like quality. And cleared the way for the shadows to form a logic based around their range of translucencies.
view28 October 2025
In Yena's flat there is currently a hibernating colony of probably about a hundred ladybugs huddled on the corner of the moulding above the tall arched windows in her living room. They've been stationed there for a month or so now as the London weather has become colder with fall slowly morphing into winter. Most of them have remained clumped together the entire time, but every once in a while one will wake up, detach from the group, and go on a little excursion around the room. A few days ago, one parachuted down onto the table where Yena and I were having dinner. Yena gave it a small slice of cucumber. It munched on it for a while, took a little rest, and then returned to its colony. Just before I began to write this, one flew down and landed on the power cord plugged into my laptop. It has been hugging it since, like a monkey clinging to a tree—I think it likes the warmth.
view26 October 2025
On diversion completed today. Its conception was primarily spurred on by Merlin James's Oxbow (2023), which I've been studying for a while—the relationship of its marks and the unique character of its surface to the components of its landscape subject. My own painting is loosely based on miles upon miles of open road on Oregon Route 99W headed toward Dundee from Portland International Airport, the recall of which meshed nicely with a bit of Phoebe Helander's aforementioned talk in which she describes repeating a rose petal form over and over as she fails to capture it in shifting light, its glitching buildup becoming visual information that composes the image indirectly. I think I was also holding similar ideas about visually fading in and out, of constantly oscillating relationships between what has just been seen and what is anticipated to be seen. Of focusing, unfocusing, and optical warping through that process.
view24 October 2025
You forgot it in people / You remembered it in people
view22 October 2025
From Guston's studio notes in I Paint What I Want To See (2022): “The only true impulse is realism” (page 252). Felt applicable to my current headspace when I re-read it today, especially in conjunction with starting my morning by watching Phoebe Helander's recent talk at the New York Studio School, which was oriented around the act of deep looking within constantly changing surroundings, lack of attachment to outcome, and how cultivating sustained attention in one's practice leads to a fuller/less degraded life. It's significant how these concepts have continued to reappear in what I've been reading and watching the past few weeks, and how a realist impulse seems to clear the way for engagement with them all. But I think what Helander helped to elucidate is how it might be more useful to think of this approach not as something rooted in realism, but rather in observation-based absorption. No subject is better or worse than any other in this context.
view20 October 2025
Image inventory: Yena's small mirror spanning the corner of her room with a lump of laundry on top of it, a fallen green and silver metal tree sculpture in some shrubs beyond the wall lining the perimeter of Denmark Hill Station, a corner of my studio building near the bathroom (bricks painted over with white, paint severely chipped and faded), orange tomato soup with drip designs in single cream, morning light fragmented onto white walls upon entering through the three arch windows in Yena's living room, an advertisement that simply reads “MORE” in large orange capital letters, reflected light on wet cobblestone outside my studio during hard rain, Baryshnikov during his HeartBeat:mb, Yena's Monstera leaning toward one of the the aforementioned arch windows in her living room, glinting reflections of a glass cup and a glass bottle on a white wall warped by moulding, a sock Yena's mother left at her flat, a white dental mold on the street, a shadow cast by a car in a residential parking lot in the shape of a spade, Sankaty Head Lighthouse, London clouds confronting London trees, a shadow in the shape of a cross on a sidewalk.
view18 October 2025
Across a creek (working title): composed from photos of greenery blurring by out the window of the shuttle to Elaina and George's wedding in Dundee, Oregon (a couple months ago) as the winding road up the mountain crossed over Hesse Creek. This work's main concern turned out to be an exercise in the organization of perception. A balance between visual solidity/focus and active, physically-informed brushwork. A cross appeared in service of unifying the central trees (and the composition as a whole), yet its form is defined by the negative space between its constituent parts, which lands on a question of representation and visual memory that feels new to my vocabulary.