view30 September 2025
More Jasper Johns from Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1996), in which he discusses his interest in “...Leonardo's idea ('Therefore, O painter, do not surround your bodies with lines...') that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” I take this to be related to something Johns mentions later in his sketchbook notes (1965), which is the avoidance of working in such a way that one “knows the results.” Assumptions and existing knowledge of simple/surface conceptions/perceptions as hinderances on a process meant to aim toward expansion and enrichment.
view28 September 2025
“On diversion”—one hears this phrase over the announcement system on London buses when they need to skip a chunk of stops for one reason or another, and I've been thinking about it in relation to painting; beginning with a destination for each work, losing control of where it is going, and (hopefully) ultimately finding a resolution is an obvious parallel. But directly thinking about diversion as its own area of inquiry in painting seems like it could be generative in that it is wrapped up in negation—of ideas, of instinct, of rational reasoning—in the act of making. Or maybe suspension is a more appropriate word, because negating choices aren't ends in and of themselves, they're by-products of self-awareness that ideally accumulate to allow the paint to subsume the image.
view26 September 2025
“I’ve always tried to define parameters for the drawings or paintings according to some organizing principle. It can be anything from an idea about acoustic space to the color range of a particular pigment. The goal is to construct a picture that is autonomous and at the same time suggests multiple associations or readings. That’s the tension, that’s where the traction is. Between image and organizing principle.“—Terry Winters
This quote was included in the release for Table of Contents, Winters's 2021 show at Matthew Marks. It almost exactly articulates what has become my process, though I think about it as more of a three-pronged approach comprised of the foundational image/forms, (flexible but not so much that it relies on the emergence of spontaneous forms to cohere), color, and a formal organizing principle other than color—line, composition, technical application of paint, etc.
For example: tomorrow I'll be going into the studio to begin with a screenshot of a man with his hands bound behind his back from an anti-meth commercial my father directed years ago (foundational image), a work titled Male Nude NM124 (1965 & 1973) by Paul Cadmus (color), and a 1971 intaglio engraving by Dieter Roth titled Little Cloud (organizing principle—line).
While each new work inevitably diverges to some extent in the making, this structure has allowed me to deepen my connection with specific art historical works, which I have to trust as a path toward hacking away the jungle covering what I'm circling around. Which right now seems to be something like the primal sensorial thing that masquerades as a reductive idea of the relationship between the figure and the landscape, or lack thereof.
view24 September 2025
“The problem with ideas is, the idea is often simply a way to focus your interest in making a work...a function of the work is not to express the idea...the idea focuses your attention in a certain way that helps you do the work.” – Jasper Johns
view22 September 2025
Returning to Jasper Johns today. Specifically two ink and water-soluble encaustic on plastic works After Larry Burrows (2014) and Farley Breaks Down (2014) from his 2019 show Recent Paintings & Works on Paper at Matthew Marks Gallery. Many more works in the show are repetitions on this same motif, (it is Johns), but the relationship between these two is illuminating something for me. The latter is a satisfyingly literal breakdown-via-liquidity of both the former and its subject, yes, but beyond that they are a case in point for one's subject as a means for making work, not an image. In many ways that says it all, but it's a needed reminder to not fall into habit out of some gross acquired desire to be materially or stylistically singular after noticing how positively the art world responds to being able to identify and then commodify an artist's work. I'm not above admitting that that has threatened to throw me off course more than once. Turning into a factory is a process that leads to the wrong kind of thoughtlessness in making, where the end product/idea overpowers the pure, radiant initial impulse of engaging with something that represents a potential door to an expanded reality.
view20 September 2025
Springboarding off of my last post, I made a new, currently untitled work that feels like the first true synthesis of a considered approach from every angle of my practice—went back to my archive of images from my time with Joey and, while they are difficult to revisit, they are asking for processing via painting with an earnestness that I haven't felt in a long time. One from a spotlit video shoot we did formed the basis of the main figure in the work, and the architecture that formed around it finally feels like it is acting naturally as an elucidating foil and an inevitable consequence.
view18 September 2025
Blot: began from archived 50s American home movie footage of two teenage boys throwing another boy in a lake. A step forward, I think, in allowing space for the subject to unmoor from its source via the materials, because the execution of the scene in loosely-handled watercolor created something much more visually interesting than the original sequence of screenshots. But visually interesting isn't the main priority, so I have been thinking much more about my sources, wondering how and why I have moved away from my own documentation and/or family archives in the first place. Regardless, I think it is time to return to them, because having turned away from them has, in my view, tinged some (not all) of my recent work with a bit of self-consciousness, which is off-putting for me. But is an important misstep that had to be taken, because I can sense something real cohering now in the space where the intentionality and delicacy of the thin stains/washes on wood technique I'm developing has a chance to meet the excavation instincts that sent me down this path almost five years ago.
view16 September 2025:
True split: Seurat's “L'écho, study for Une Baignade, Asnières” in mind, important that the whole thing coheres and dissolves. A child or smaller figure stretching fabric over his head to reveal a rich cherry-red/pink interior, a parent or larger figure looming over him with a hand raised. A drama between the figures that acknowledges something gentle and sinister in equal measure, but also something that conveys their inverse relationship, their dependence on one another to exist that questions their awareness of one another.
view14 September 2025
The video for “We Like to Party” (1998) by Vengaboys...something feral and disorienting about the 136 bpm, relentlessly pumping choreography, direct eye contact with the camera, almost Jodorowskyian shots of them posed around different parts of Spain, and the lyrics—especially in the prechorus: “Happiness is just around the corner.”
view12 September 2025
Son shell: Began based on Omeed playing cello at Red Room until the afterimage of Tessa pulling a hermit crab out of clear ocean water in Sag Harbor overlapped it and mixed with contemplation of home, sleep, death, omnipresent technology, rest, and ultimately something that feels pretty aligned with the allegory of the cave in relation to the wisdom accrued from both growing older and remaining steadfast on one's artistic path.