view7 July 2026
When a young hitting prospect is called up to the major leagues for the first time, it is usually expected that he will struggle for at least a few hundred at-bats as he adjusts to Major League pitching. In a game where power is coveted (and handsomely compensated), it can be tempting for him to swing his hardest at almost everything, relying on raw talent and luck without fully realizing that that's what he's doing.
This mindset is easy for pitchers to exploit; they simply throw him less strikes and let him be his own undoing. But, if he's level-headed and motivated, over time he will start to recognize his own weaknesses and work to refine his approach. He will learn that discipline begets results, and discipline comes from honing his eye.
There are many ways he can train this skill, but on a daily basis it often comes down to studying his opponents' tendencies—the unique speed, spin, vertical and horizontal movement, arm angles, and sequencing of their pitches—so that he can lay off of more pitches out of the strike zone and only swing at those in the zone, thereby increasing the likelihood of both quality contact and bases on balls.
This leads to a higher on-base percentage, which is a good indicator that front office executives can project his future value with confidence. Because ultimately baseball is about returning home safely as much and as consistently as possible, and getting on base means you've left but you're on your way back.
view5 July 2026
Airframe (working title): an opening coinciding with a slamming, a gust of fresh air and momentum, light clipping edges, more delimitation but with less information. In the body of work that is coming together—there are probably five or six paintings contending right now—this one is the most pared back (and maybe the most sure of itself as a result). But it's hard to know if I trust it or not yet. Which is usually a sign that it's doing something. Anyway, this one comes on the heels of seeing Picabia at Hauser & Wirth today, which was actually a bit underwhelming (curation kind of one-note) but nevertheless left me with swirling impressions of bold line and calculated overlay. Have also been on a Richard Hamilton kick, and his Five Tyres Remoulded (1971) portfolio seems to be stuck in my mind; a manual on spatial exploration and contradiction and somehow transcending intention while declaring it. And so I came to a painting of a funneling of action, a hollowing of a vessel, a tidal force bottlenecked into a tiny collision under an intimate architecture. Looking ahead, I now see a small square of a day that looms large, its origami structure gradually unfolding.
view3 July 2026
Bel sito: have been working on a painting that began from looking at the golden wallpaper surrounding two small lamps hung askew at the hotel Yena and I stayed at for our last night in Venice on our recent trip. This has already been a unique process as far as accumulation is concerned—I've been gradually working into the painting day after day with pencil, scratches, and thin layers of two shades of gray-blue (leaving light out of the picture as much as possible) aimed at the intricacies of the patterning, not for detail's sake but to hopefully get closer and closer to the effect of a wave of shimmering ornateness flattened into something threatening to become monolithic and frozen and cold. A good conversation about this yesterday with Edith in her studio as she works away on a similar visual tangle in the form of a patch of grass under a bracelet. Identifying naturally occurring dynamics, toggling them towards an equilibrium or lack thereof. Questions around how closely to hold the biographical as an invisible structure informing material and formal decisions. If at all.
Currently parsing through James Duffield Harding's On Drawing Trees and Nature (originally published in 1855; expanded reprint published in 2005), and I've been pretty directly referencing his teachings on line, light, form, and negative space with respect to depicting foliage as I develop Bel sito. I think there's maybe something about what the mind does when confronted with varying amounts of contextualized blank space—automatically conjuring what it knows or hopes to be true—that feels analogous to the affectionate warping of patterns as they are reshaped in the process of being committed to memory.
view1 July 2026
Moving House (show title)
view29 June 2026
“Then” (1979) by Gregory Orr
I THEN
My parents and the parents
of others were pillars of meat
the sky's blue roof rested on.
Around them grew flowers
with stalks so thin they bent
double with their own red weight,
their blossoms brushed the dust.
2 THE CHANGE
All that summer a gray
flotilla of clouds drifted above;
clouds that had hauled up
into themselves all earth's tears.
Clarity of air. Each dusk
I watched them lower their anchors
into the parched fields:
heavy glass statues of women.
view27 June 2026
Clefs: a rewarding painting. Based on some tiny paper Earth lanterns I saw receding into Tyler's room from the staircase at our flat. Delicate duplicate planets hanging in the thick summer air, intermittently nudged by the wind from a fan out of sight at the other end of the room.
Ordinal data is a categorical, statistical data type where the variables have natural, ordered categories and the distances between the categories are not known.
I've been looking at a lot of Bellmer's drawings and prints again this week, specifically his engravings from his Mode d'Emploi (1967) portfolio. There's one particular piece from the seven in that collection—a small one (roughly 4x6 inch plate) titled Ways of Daring—that I think I can trace a lot of the thinking around this work to in retrospect. Its weblike line work masterfully gets at something I'm trying for: employing structures that allow planes to interact beyond their pictorial functionality. Or, more simply, how line can be a simultaneously cohering and fragmenting force. It's also emotionally bare yet confounding in the way that I like. In the bottom right there appears to be a baby (or two) engrossed in something. A step up and to the left are two more figures wrapped around and bound to each other (think Christo), possibly in a sexual position (probably; it's Bellmer). Up and to the right from them, almost in the middle of the composition, is a more muddled group of figures, an orgiastic heap. Pulling away from yet tethered to them toward the top right corner is an inscrutable, knotty, limb-like cluster. And at the top left, almost floating but for one planar line by its knees, is what looks like a kneeling figure with a beaked nose. The whole thing is an upward growth and a deconstruction with phases linked and estranged.
Back to my painting—it occurs to me that a part of it could also be a swipe at the emotional register of time passing in the 5,000 mile space between two opposite poles. Here are some selected lyrics from “Picture of Return” by Superfan:
The time that’s blowing me through
Deflated surroundings
Putting appearance underneath the skin
Breaking at the corners
The room acting as my witness
To manipulated order
I’m wishing his face was never a picture of return
view25 June 2026
I have just learned, (through the press release from Liam Halvorsen's 2024 show The Prepolitics at 100 Bell Towers in Montreal), about Dr. Julius Neubronner's invention of pigeon photography. The German apothecary apparently had a flock of pigeons, and in 1907 he filed a patent application for his pigeon camera, which he would put on a timer and strap to his birds so they could take photos (some of the earliest aerial photos ever) as they flew.
The images they produced are wonderful. Rooftops of homes and buildings, streets curling through cities, looming hillsides and lonely trees, people barely and unrecognizably pocking urban landscapes as blurred smudges. Always at strange angles, and often with parts of their wings flapping into frame like a finger slipping over a lens. Whimsical and arbitrary, but infused with a starkness both peaceful and sort of post-apocalyptic. Something very relieving about the dense and unbothered emptiness that is left once humans exit the eye.
view23 June 2026
Saw Shao Fan's show Refrain | 复沓 at White Cube this morning—wonderful work. First time in a while that such large paintings have felt justified. Deep sensitivity in all aspects, a practice of looking and re-looking, and a lived engagement with antiquity that generates work with an intensity that truly honors his subjects both human and nonhuman. There are a few stunners, but Fruit 1924 (2024) and Rabbit Portrait 1025 (2025)—both large ink on rice paper works—are with me the most right now. Fruit has an almost paper-like two-dimensionality; it's an apple sliced in half to reveal a core that becomes a network of overlapping planes and openings. Starts to become a skull-like memento mori the longer you look at it. Rabbit manages to achieve an unflinchingly direct and confrontational quality through symmetry without locking itself off in any way (which is something that usually doesn't sit well with me)—the odd strands of hair/whiskers whimsically trail off beyond their defining limits, and certain elements like the white of the rabbit's ears remain true to the eye rather than an ideal, so my feeling is that the impressive balance comes more from an endearing emotional groundedness than a technical fastidiousness.
view21 June 2026
The walls in my room at my flat are covered in Anaglypta Shelburne vinyl wallpaper. This is a catalog of markings/imperfections I can see on the south-facing wall from where I'm sitting.
A long (maybe two feet in length) and thin air pocket line snaking from halfway up the right of the wall down to the top of a stack of laundry on my floor. It actually looks just like a snake. A collapsed pocket of air, maybe six by three inches, that has cracked on top—it looks like an oyster shell beginning to open. Six subtle but visible perfectly straight vertical lines (looks like the individual panels that comprise the whole wall) spanning from ceiling to carpet. Three little blotches of what looks like dried blood, perhaps from past tenants killing mosquitos or other bugs or just getting blood on the walls somehow. Seven small holes from where people have put pins or screws in, two of which I am currently using to hang a piece of artwork (my father's sketch of a flint rock) and a bright red-bordered dollar-store mirror (the reflection is wonky from far away but accurate up close). Three more large air pockets creating a U-shape arcing up from the bottom left of the first air pocket line I mentioned—these ones are pretty flat, so they sort of disappear in lower light and I'm noticing them more now in the daylight. A long, irregular line of white paint running the length of the wall at the top near where it meets the ceiling that looks like it might be covering a messy sealing job that was done before I moved in. There's a similar line painted just above the door frame (which is embedded on the far left of the wall I'm looking at).
view19 June 2026
Attempted a painting today based on the fragmented reflection of a plane on wet tarmac that I saw while boarding a recent flight from London to Venice. Primed the panel with a left-to-right gradient from a bright yellow to a dense black—the idea was to then slowly layer loose/thin form lines over the gradient from bottom to top in a relatively monochrome gray-blue palette and see what rhythms and shapes cohered as the whole thing took on a sense of motion. An okay idea, but it just didn't work, probably because it was too determined. Having a practice means constantly rewriting one's own rules, and it feels like I've done a bit of over-defining in recent days that made me rigid in my approach. So it's time for a break from the studio for a while in the interest of recalibration and refocusing.
But what I can say now, for when I resume, is that there needs to be some kind of reckoning as far as my handling of color and its relationship to the logic I've been discovering. Destruction as well as building, (while it now feels overly representative to me almost eight months later), is perhaps a good work to go back to. That one set a baseline for accumulated tactility in conjunction with early watercolor layers that are constantly shifting underneath and weaving in and out of the topmost oil layers so that there's an optical softness even with clarity of form. And when I think about the work I now want to make, which is work that is free to break away from my visual references by way of every formal element considered in a delimitation stack while still remaining true to an invisible structure of observed logic, that might be a place to restart. Forms that float, reorganize themselves and react to each other, cause friction between background and foreground as well as flatness and depth, and ultimately create a self-regenerating mesh of lived-in experience and presence. Now I'll forget everything I just said.