12 April 2026
Rosy day
My feet went surfing and found a dream beer a beer that juices the mouth and wets the gut that kicks history into a big blue sky and combs the skin. I brought news of this beer to my love room where I could bend it in private I warped it and kissed it and gave it long names then I plucked its pages and ground them into a clean face, which I wrapped in wax paper and left on the stoop jutting out from where my best friend used to live
10 April 2026
Plastic bed: the first work in a while that is weightless, that doesn't really seem to triangulate to any obvious reference points (that I'm aware of). Maybe a bit of those Ken Price acrylic and ink on paper works that I saw in New York last fall. But otherwise its tether is loose. Reminds me of how it felt making a small gouache painting called Quarantine sunrise six years ago; it suddenly asked a lot of questions that seem like they'll lead to more questions, a crop field becoming larger and more fertile and perhaps more impenetrable. I'll have more to say about it, but for today I'm just going to enjoy the feeling.
8 April 2026
Tonight on the way home from the gym I was one of two people on the 345 bus toward South Kensington. The other was a guy in tan cargo pants holding a long stick made of what looked like driftwood. He was sitting in the bottom section of the bus monologuing out loud when I got on, but I couldn't hear what he was saying because I had my noise cancelling headphones in. I went and sat in the top section and kept them in, but I could still faintly hear him going and going as we made our way through Battersea into Kensington. When my stop arrived (South Kensington Station), I removed my headphones as I was stepping off the bus and heard the man say: “You've got water in the earth? I'm jumping in.”
6 April 2026
In my house there are two red handprints made out of some kind of resin that are stuck to the interior face of the glass door that opens to the backyard. They were there when I moved in and are probably part of a past Halloween decoration—seems like they're meant to appear as bloody, because they have oscillating bottom edges that I think are meant to imply dripping. But on the contrary, their slight three-dimensionality gives them a stagnant, low relief sculptural feeling. Like they're growing out of the glass. And there are little air bubbles and material inconsistencies inside the resin that refract light in subtle and complex ways when the sun hangs over the backyard fence and shoots into the house (happening more and more this time of year). Embarked on painting one of the prints today and found it to be a lovely way into working. Have been looking at Paul Klee's India ink and watercolor View of a Mountain Sanctuary (1926) this week, and while its questions around seeing might be primarily connected to vantage point more than anything else, his linework in it is still informing the way I'm approaching the subject's relationship to its environment, or the background's relationship to the foreground, or the relationship between touch and sight. Especially as it relates to the handprint/hand stencil as an ancient symbol.
4 April 2026
Stoop (working title): this painting came together in a fresh way for me. Essentially took the bones of an idea I have been sketching (black Peckham cat sleeping on a stoop) and found a wireframe for it in a past failure that was lying around—the bottom of a large rectangle filled with an orange to blue gradient formed a front door facade and a surface for the cat, like a picture-in-picture. Which abstracted the idea nicely and put me in the mind of that great 2024 Colin Crumplin show at Castor; material play/experimentation guiding first choices towards reviving subconsciously-generated images/associations.
2 April 2026
Face (working title): Another painting of Calvin's room, this one a different corner of it than Destruction as well as building. Still thinking about John Lees, particularly APEX (2003-04) for the color weaving in and out of the scaffolding created by the years of buildup—buried here, luminous there, equal parts scraped away and globbed on. I think today was about working towards an expedited version of that kind of armature: tinted transparent primer, watercolor, and thin blotted washes of oil before the thicker top layer. And it seems to have worked; in terms of the pulse of the painting's end result yes, but more importantly as a track to alternate attaching to and veering off of. Which meshed reflected the subject—a wall peeling into multicolored strips, light and paint and stone relating to each other in clumsy, microscopic ways. Must also mention Bill Hayden, studying his ink drawings right now. His Structure (2022-23) is perfect.
31 March 2026
In our last poetry workshop, Jonathan sent us on a Carl Phillips dive. First his 2018 essay Muscularity and Eros: On Syntax for At Length and then a handful of poems. “A Kind of Meadow” (2000) has been with me ever since. Very painterly. There's something about it that puts me in a place similar to Polke's Die Fahrt auf der Unendlichkeitsacht III (Die Motorradlampe) (1971)—every new door opens to a misdirect or redirect, but the flow of the whole remains cohesive and unencumbered. A particular example via enjambment in a middle stanza:
A kind of meadow, where it ends begin trees, from whose twinning of late light and the already underway darkness you were expecting perhaps
And that's the rhythm all the way through, of starts and stops meshing and trading places. Which happens verbally in the mouth, but also visually; bones, branches, and fretwork form a grid that dapples both shadow and light, shooting both through the length of the poem. Words examining themselves as they are produced.
29 March 2026
Ghost rain (working title): had this one turned around for a while, but I came back to it and I think it is now finally somewhat resolved. The core of the image came from standing at the threshold to the backyard in my house. The greenery at the end of the yard is like a portal for wildlife, especially for cats, and maybe that has been part of the fascination. But it must also be something about the perception/experience of a repeatedly visited place changing over time, both in sight and mind. Prunella Clough: ...the sense of place is crucial for me and involves sensations other than the purely optical ones of observation. But of course they coexist. Which is perhaps why I spent a lot of time with John Lees's work during the making of this one (especially his painting Bathtub [1972-2010] which, as the dates imply, matured and morphed over close to three decades—he explains this in a charming talk he did for the New York Studio School that you can find easily on YouTube). Prodding that link between the optical and the metaphysical. As my floaters start to visit more often with the sun slowly emerging here in London, I'm also considering different stripes of visual noise and their implications. Of how pieces of the perceiver can break off and join the perceived, both intentionally and spontaneously.
27 March 2026
Alighting (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 other unique templates (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.
25 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.