2 May 2026
“Beggar's Song” by Gregory Orr (2002)
Here's a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me.
Small then, and smaller. My desire's to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart.
And if the heart's a rock I'll whack it with this tin cup and eat the sparks, always screaming, always screaming for more.
30 April 2026
Bench: painted a bench I saw in Dulwich Park while walking there a few weeks ago. Made of wooden slats riveted to thin, flat, ribbon-like iron rails. I remember that from a certain angle it separated from its function and took on the appearance of something like a rickety bridge, or piano keys, or teeth. That Ruscha pastel and gunpowder drawing Self (1967) came to mind after I painted it—the attempt at solidified grace. And the rail attached itself to the image's border, which I taped off loosely (for no discernible reason, but in hindsight was a decision that gelled nicely with the slight warping of the planks that comprise the bench's sitting surface). Thought about Rita talking about making unforgiving paintings too. An intentional arrangement of an observation, a speculative suggestion for seeing. Color needs to be worked in a bit more, but it's almost there.
28 April 2026
A painting where the emergence of the forms that comprise it is delayed and resisted for as long as possible. A monochrome painting, intense flatness, forms only described by short light shadows and textures. A painting with linework topography built into its prepared surface by using thickened transparent primer. A bleeding background. A cloud as a color/linework study. A painting on a layer of bubbles. A painting made by scraping away black and white over a colorful underpainting wash. A collage made with clear tape tinted by thin washes of acrylic. A painting of an image broken into Doppler segments—a meeting in the image near where the segments are closest/most intense.
26 April 2026
Had limited time today, so I took out a small panel and decided to paint the wireframe star that I saw in a window that I've had taped to the studio wall for a week or so now. It answered the call in a lovely way, and I think it will end up serving as a study for a larger and more refined version of itself. Which isn't an order of operations I've really employed before, but it feels necessary and right for this case. Anyway, the way the star shape divided space made for a nicely dizzying structure to work within—each slice of the shape became a plane to deal with/play with. To thicken forward or dilute back, to accentuate or hide, to fill or erase, to mark the time spent characterizing the depth of the surface holding this thin but totemic thing. Was reminded again of Phoebe Helander's wire paintings on the way home tonight, and maybe they were a subconscious guide. Had Catherine Murphy's 2014 Studio Wall drawing (it's in her beautiful 2016 monograph that I have) sitting there while I was working too.
24 April 2026
The Leonardo book A Life in Drawing (2019) has been open on the floor of my studio this week; specifically his map drawings. In the summer of 1504, he was employed by the Florentine government to map parts of the river Arno, and there's one drawing in particular that I keep returning to—on page 127, fig. 93—A weir on the Arno east of Florence. It describes damage to the river embankment from water bursting through a weir. Such a wonderful drawing, the movement of the water alive in his precisely-rendered rushing and swirling lines, the site of destruction gently heightened with a darker blue than the rest of the wash representing the water. That meeting, between the physical intensity of natural phenomena and measured observational focus such that the eye dilates enough to make room for the emotion of a space to enter through the hand, is something close to what I'm after right now.
22 April 2026
Image inventory: fuzzy figure on a street from above through a magnifying glass, a calligraphic graffiti of the letter B on the tube, the point of a man's mohawk on his neck approaching the apex of a mandala-like tattoo on his back, an arching tree canopy over a street receding downhill into a distant cluster of homes (near Crystal Palace Park), the tail of a concrete lion outside the British Museum, a peeling billboard of a billboard, at the top of a hill a yellow to red gradient sculpture (yellow and orange vertical steel beams leaning against a red one), dead fish stacked vertically in bowls on a table at a farmer's market, a spider web spanning a hole in a brick wall, a small wire dragonfly sculpture, a street intersection (stark shadows) from above, a mouse running across tube tracks.
20 April 2026
I keep encountering stars. Glow-in-the-dark stars at the dollar store (have gifted them to friends for their studios and there's one in mine), the Big Dipper scooping the sky between Yena's flat and her neighbors' building when walking up the steep driveway to her door after her evening shift, the wrapping paper (navy with yellow stars) Ruba used for my birthday gift, the rainbow whirligig I found in Wood Green, and most recently, a sort of wireframe star sculpture in the window of a flat I saw from the second deck of a bus I was on while passing through Denmark Hill. It was almost pressed against the glass like a prisoner, and at its base was what appeared to be a pile of clothes that receded into darkness. I printed the photo I took from my printer, which is low on black ink, so it printed as basically an inverse image. That made it look like a giant star-shaped wind turbine beginning to disintegrate while looming over a mountainous landscape.
18 April 2026
Another little chunk from my time in Jake's studio: before we started recording he was showing me a Bosch he was looking at. I want to say it was The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1501)—I'm remembering the fire in the distance and the distinctive warm/cool contrasted palette. After enjoying the sheer imagination on display and clocking the tumbling flatness of the composition (which I see Jake sometimes employing in his own way), we got to talking about the possibilities that emerge when the landscape is treated as an arena. How Kent functions that way for Jake. I shared with him how I've been spending time with Dieter Roth's 96 Piccadillies series (1977), which seems like it served a similar purpose at the time it was developed. I'm drawn to the idea of a contained ecosystem where performance, death, life, entry, and exit can happen when revisited and revisited and revisited. I think my arena is something like the world seen when the body or the eye is in motion, when colors and forms and sounds and language are filtered by a kind of regularly-intervening Doppler effect that constantly rearranges my sensory hierarchy.
16 April 2026
Great to talk with Jake for the podcast, many threads I'm looking forward to revisiting while editing, but one part that is stuck in my head right now is how he explained why people have been leaving his work over the past year or so. How the logic that supports what he's working towards can no longer accommodate them, how he feels like that door has been closed (I feel the same way, for now at least). But what struck a particular chord was his description of his paintings aiming for the feeling of the air in between the body and his subjects/motifs. I'm paraphrasing slightly there, will have to revise if necessary once I listen back to the recording. But I thought that was a lovely notion and a worthy pursuit.
14 April 2026
Rosy day
My feet went surfing and found a dream beer, a beer that juices the mouth and suns the gut, that kicks history into a wide blue sky and combs the skin.
I brought this news to my love room where I could hold it in private. I warped it and praised it and gave it long names then plucked its dead minutes and ground them into a clean face,
which I wrapped in wax paper and left on the stoop jutting out from the house where my good friend used to live