view28 January 2026
Star in a bag (working title, or maybe Ornament): think I was interested here in trying to fragment in a new way. It seems like the approach was to try to paint like collaging, to allow shapes to overlap while remaining as faithful as possible to the logic I initially perceived in my visual source (a plastic glow-in-the-dark star cloaked by a red Chinese New Year envelope). To cause an incidental explosion or a breakdown from a center or axis and then probe any relationships that materialize beyond the hand. To set something in motion so that forms collide and conjoin and echo as they expand outward. A kind of polyphony. Have been looking at Schwitters a lot this week, particularly his 1925 collage Untitled (Heures crépusculaires). Stacked blocks of muted values and slices of visual information coalescing into gradations of color and thought.
view26 January 2026
Last night I reorganized a drawer of ephemera had been piling up in since I moved into my new place. Noting some arrangements and encounters here. Print of the top of a silver spoon protruding from the opened top of a Chinese New Year red envelope, which contained a plastic glow-in-the-dark star. On an envelope that contained a wedding invitation: an ink-stamped snowman overlapping a postage stamp with a pink begonia on it, the word “forever” arcing over the snowman's torso. Pink tissue paper cradling a neon-yellow tennis ball. A program from the Tate with some Cézanne apples on the cover partially obscured by a slightly blurry polaroid from Winchester of a black cat nestled into an angle made by two pieces of wood in the guardrail of a wooden footbridge over a stream.
view24 January 2026
Began the day sitting by the window in my room under the white morning sun with my eyes closed. Opened them and a black bird flew by.
view22 January 2026
Starlight Way (working title): I've wanted to make an all-white painting for a while and have failed at past attempts, but it seems I may have finally found a way into one. Which in my head felt something like approaching the painting as a white Conté crayon drawing on toned paper. The nucleus of the image is based off of a 9 meter sculpture of a scaled model Qatar Airways Boeing 777-9 aircraft around Heathrow Terminal 4 near Starlight Way. The painting doesn't reflect or need to reflect that specific location visually, so the title will change. Maybe just Plane is better...it is. Anyway, the important part is what the paint is doing. The explorations of space, value, line, and yes—plane—that emerged. I think I can trace those elements back to two works I looked at a lot this week:
Phoebe Helander, Wire Form III (Divided Space) (2026)
David Ostrowski, F (Jung, Brutal, Gutaussehend) (2012)
Each of these paintings address space/the picture plane/gravity/color in interesting ways, and while it's unwise to reach for these effects intentionally, I do think what subconsciously drew me to portraying the sculpture was related to these concerns via its position as an object unmooring from the ground while remaining fixed to it. And I think what resulted sits at the center of an axis that acknowledges multiple potential trains of thought without committing fully to any of them—emerging from/being pulled back into a place of origin, crossing/being stuck at a horizon, taking off/crashing, dissecting space/being absorbed by space, and additive line/subtractive line.
view20 January 2026
Image inventory: Faint reflection of a shower curtain on marble (decay, rust, dirt, sand, columns, metal), toothbrush on its side looking at its reflection in a small broken mirror (blue, melting, recognizing, horizontal, cracking), a new leaf growing from a houseplant (wet, green, light, soil, brown, glistening, dew), Daejeon covered in snow (pale yellow sky, my shaved head), a broken foosball table in the sun (slanted shadows of foosmen, foosmen looking at shadows, foosmen turned up, foosmen turned down), a neon yellow rope and a thin rainbow slouching against a brick wall (phenomena, approaching, slight, long), a light bulb with dew on it, an ashtray with rainwater (preserved, coy fish, shrimp, spooning), orange/yellow windows of a building in Wood Green (sunglasses), a green rubbish bin surrounded by blue rubbish bins (outnumbered), two carrots in a Tupperware container (two are three), a woman sitting on a bus with city lights encircling her (fireflies, string lights), giant advertisement of strawberries and raspberries in a window (blood), cone-shaped light (hood), giant shadow of a hand in the corner of a room.
view18 January 2026
Walked along the perimeter of the Walthamstow Wetlands on a path lined by a high sloping grassy bank/berm. Its crest sat in my sight just at the height of some of the taller buildings across the reservoir in Tottenham. Lots of ducks waddling around at the crest, which made for a fun effect—like they were using the tops of the buildings as stepping stones for their webbed feet. They may have actually been geese or some sort of geese hybrids, necks were pretty long. Maybe Canada Geese. In any case, it was gray paved path, big soft wall of dull green/yellow, wet black feet on buildings, gray-brown feathers, and gray-blue sky. To mind: Frank Walter: Untitled (1988, a green/blue/white/beige landscape), Richard Diebenkorn: Bridge (1961), Alex Katz: Untitled (Dog On The Beach) (2002). Flat wall waves of color. Compressed, stacked, arranged, brought forward. As I was walking, one duck/goose followed me for a couple minutes. It would waddle ahead of my gait, swivel its head to stare at me as I passed, and then waddle further ahead of me again. Until it stopped to snack on some grass, at which point it was no longer interested in me.
view16 January 2026
(Happy birthday to me)
Flat light (working title): The light bulb in my flat, my flat through the light bulb. Hard to say if it's working or not yet. Have been looking at Artschwager's Intersect (1992) aquatint/drypoint work of a dog in a corner a lot this week. That monochrome approach to sitting at some essential point where vision both understands an essence and fails to differentiate between its constantly changing parts felt (and still feels) like something related to why I keep approaching light. And so I painted a corner of my room through an unilluminated light bulb. Mixed colors instinctually this time (as opposed to from a reference work), and while I did not intend this, it occurred to me after I finished working how the hues and tones seem to relate directly to the amalgam of visual sensations I've absorbed in my room in the three plus weeks since I moved in.
view14 January 2026
Today in my Korean lesson I learned how to say: 맥주 좋아해요
view12 January 2026
From a recent Sean Tatol review:
”...the more he struggles the more he reveals himself as consummately tasteful. If I had to guess why, I think it's because his desire is to make a painting, and that reflexive concern with painting-in-itself gets caught in a knot that can't produce the kind of verve that painters are after. Compare this to Pollock: 'My concern is with the rhythms of nature... the way the ocean moves... the Ocean's what the expanse of the West was for me.' In spite of the cheesy existential-primordial tone, he points towards the idea of something he wants to create by the means of paint.”
Taste really is the misguiding master of our times. I'm not immune to it, spent a long formative time honing my own for reasons that now feel embarrassing. But I also remember how during that time there were periods of making that unintentionally (crucially) ignored taste and used whatever tool was handy to capture incidental moments, and the art that resulted has a singular aura. Thinking specifically of carrying my half-broken little early aughts digital Canon around with me in the Big Bear mountains with Joey.
view10 January 2026
Visited Sebastián's studio, brought him one of the hand-drip coffee bags Yena's father makes. This one was an Ethiopia Geisha with a Manet on the packaging (Woman Reading, 1880-82). When I handed it over, Sebastián immediately placed it among the other objects on one of the still life surfaces in his space. I knew from researching his work and seeing his current show (Lustre at Interval Clerkenwell; if you're reading this you should go see it) that he paints master paintings into his compositions, but it hadn't occurred to me that I was literally handing him a mini master painting. So that was a lovely synchronicity. But I mention it because it speaks to what I feel is the main thing I learned from him, which is how to create a studio that is a self-regenerating ecosystem. If it comes into his space, it becomes part of its orbit and nourishment. I had the sense in there that everything in the space was vital, alive, able to be used at a moment's notice. Which aligns with how he described looking and working with attention and openness, which includes an openness to freely modulating his process through any number of variables including light, objects, and reference works. At risk of sounding dramatic, coming face to face with a world built out so fully altered my thinking around my own practice pretty significantly in that as soon as I left his space, I began to think more carefully about what it is that I don't have to think about at all (or what is lodged at my core). Into my head then popped William Eggleston's famous Greenwood, Mississippi work (1971, the one of the light bulb on a red ceiling). There's a similar bulb in the room at my new flat. It has always been about light (and looking democratically), I think.