view23 March 2026
Sub scene (working title): alighted at Wood Green station and noticed, for the first time, an odd and artful decorative ventilation grill up high on the tiled platform wall close to the ceiling. It depicts an idyllic scene in a panoramic Art Deco style—what appears to be a deer seated under a shining sun, flanked on either side by a flying bird and three trees. Turns out it's a bronze that was designed by the artist Harold Stabler (1872-1945) in the early 1930s for the station's unveiling in 1932, which he made along with two others (same size/dimensions) that now reside at Turnpike Lane and Manor House stations. Apparently the designs were meant to allude to the history and daily life of each station's neighborhood, which is something to sit with given the current state of things in that part of the city (more on that later, have been thinking a lot about the street life where I live). But I was initially drawn to it for the strange effect of the serenity of its subject matter rendered in what is now, nearly a hundred years after its creation, almost charcoal gray metalwork that floats on a mesh grid over the intense deep blackness of the vent's interior. There's one bit in particular that I've been working with, from the left half of it, where a bird's wing is clipped at the top by the boundary of the rectangle that frames the entire piece while its other wing is almost fused to a vertical line behind it. While in flight.
view21 March 2026
Found a Bush TR82 transistor radio in my house. The Bush company (still active) apparently takes its name from Shepherd's Bush in London, which as it happens was the first neighborhood I lived in when I came to the UK. This particular model was introduced in 1959 and was apparently popular for its design and portability. But I noticed it for its dial—wave frequencies and various cities around the world (Gothenburg, Istanbul, Copenhagen, Zurich, Glasgow, Bordeaux, Warsaw, St. Petersburg, Prague, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Nice, Vienna, Athens, Rome, Geneva) encircle a tiny convex mirrored surface at the center of the dial. I've been carrying the radio around with me, using this mirrored surface to reflect spaces (and then photograph those reflections) as references. It's a wonderful thing that happens with the way this mirror compresses and simplifies spaces into contrasting tones and blocks of color; the mirror seems to heighten highlights and darken shadows. I'm wary of singularizing detail being lost in that process, but seeing a space minimized in size and reduced to its overarching tonal relationships has created a path towards exploratory extrapolation in my sketching process that is really proving useful towards approaching observation with a fresh sense of malleability.
view19 March 2026
In my house there's a boiler manometer stamped with a tiny logo comprised of a bunny in a black rectangle just under the indicator needle. Turns out it's an early 2000s logo for The Vaillant Group, a leading and globally-active heating technology company. Apparently, according to the company website, on Easter Sunday of 1899 Johann Vaillant was reading the magazine Alte und Neue Welt when he found an image of a rabbit hatching from an egg. He bought the image and copyright to make it his company's logo, which it still is to this day. Amazing. Though sadly its design has morphed quite a bit. There's a little video on the same website showing the evolution of the logo—the original 1899 version is easily the most striking. Gorgeous and intricate, the egg shape stippled and fragmented with precision, the hare boldly portrayed in a deep inky black with an emotion somewhere between brave and apprehensive as it emerges from its shell.
view17 March 2026
Laurie Spiegel—The Expanding Universe (1980)
view15 March 2026
Discovered Joel Wyllie's wonderful work today. Lingers in a fresh, fertile, ungraspable land in a way that reminds me of the drawings of Trisha Donnelly and Jay DeFeo. Sparing, intentional, gentle use of color only where necessary, which elevates its potency. A good reminder. Curious about where his recent forms (thinking mostly of the drawings from his 2025 show Aerial the Projectionist at Foreign & Domestic) accumulate from—I remember seeing a photo of DeFeo's studio with a ballet slipper draped over a hanger bar. There's an interview he did around that show where he articulates something I've felt myself quite a bit recently in terms of seeing images while in motion: “...I have spent a lot of time driving since I moved to Suffolk five years ago, and have become increasingly interested in the branding on trucks and lorries. I love some of the minimal designs, the typography, the flat bold colors and the riveted surfaces. I saw a ‘Europa Logistics’ lorry recently driving down to London—its logo was a beautifully simple portrait of a woman in the wind, just red and white, painted huge on the side. It’s also the nature in which they’re usually seen—fleeting and at multiple angles. This interest has coincided with what feels like a simplifying of the forms in my work...”
view13 March 2026
Cleaned up my phone's photo library today and found that I've been taking pictures of weather-warped missing animal signs for years. When I think about the recent attempt at painting the one I saw in Forest Hill in tandem with Face shield bag, Third man, Flat window, and On diversion (among many others), it's clear that I'm trying to find a way to address a kind of everyday splicing/segmenting/rupturing of vision. Swan (working title) is one I made today with perhaps a similar concern. From a discarded pack of Swan filter tips I saw on the ground near the bus stop by my studio. The big elegant bird framed and kind of caged by both the package design and the light shifting across its creases. Also, back to Third man—it resolved itself today with a third layer. Became two levels of sheer webbing suspending the star instead of one, which elevated it to something about the holder being held, the patch reinforced from beyond the context of the wound site.
view11 March 2026
Face shield bag (working title): was walking in Vauxhall and found the outer packaging for a set of CPR mannequin shields. Made of transparent plastic, on which was printed a wonderfully-poorly-rendered line drawing diagram showing how to use the product—hands affixing a shield to a mannequin's lifeless face, another (living?) face entering the diagram's second stage to put its lips to the first one. All folded in on itself and resting delicately over sparse weeds sprouting from wet soil squeezed up against a concrete curb. Something about it brought to mind Polke's watchtower series (particularly Watchtower (Hochsitz) from 1984), both in mood—relaxed at a kind of equilibrium but sinister—and visual complexity—the bent plastic packaging caught daylight at odd angles, blocking visibility of the weeds, soil, and diagram here and there. What resulted is a painting that to me feels ancient, like a hieroglyph partially lost to material decay. Which sits in an odd harmony with the satisfaction on the face floating at the top of the composition. The color is indebted to Eliot Porter's Winter Wren, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine (1960), which holds an aspirational kind of long-ago-now-ness that I'm permanently searching for.
view9 March 2026
Richard Serra's Verb List (1967) reproduced here:
to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to complement to enclose to surround to encircle to hide to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of simultaneity of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of carbonization to continue
view7 March 2026
Chair, wall, & pipe: a small collage on two notecards (roughly half of one glued on top of another) in pencil, ink, and acrylic. There’s an outdoor chair outside someone’s studio across from my building at Vanguard that sits against a brick wall, from which protrudes a short length of silver piping. The piping extends parallel to the ground such that it appears to be floating by its own power, like a snake hovering its head/trunk—it looks like it’s searching. Its form mirrors the rhythm of the seat of the chair next to it, almost like the two have simultaneously looked away from each other. But they’re bound by the wall they share.
view5 March 2026
Passed lots of street preachers on my way to poke around the dollar stores in Wood Green today. On my way home, an angry-looking man (vein bulging from a red bald head) emerged from a building with a bag of birdseed, was a few paces ahead of me almost the entire way back. When we got to Wood Green station, he made a beeline for a man monologuing about Jesus through a handheld microphone and then emptied the entirety of the birdseed in a circle around him. The angry man shouted obscenities as pigeons descended on the feed in a big gray flurry around the preacher, who just kept on preaching.