view24 June 2025
A small reflection on Beth's work in Sight-read at A.P.T., as it's really sticking with me. The first thing that comes to mind is meeting and departing the surface—I'm struck by how subtly but powerfully the work holds moments in the tension between that feeling of arrival and departure. How there are spots of saturated boldness or accumulation or density that still seem just on the verge of escape or begin to disintegrate through proximate duplication/repetition. I think that relates to surprise, which I don't sense all that often through paint but certainly did in her work. I'm thinking of one moment in a particular piece (the name alludes me at the moment without the show checklist in front of me, note to amend this bit) where the sheer quality of the paper and the white wall it was mounted on combined to essentially camouflage two amoeba-like white forms oozing into the composition from the top right and bottom right corners. The effect was surprising both optically and conceptually, a collision introduced in an area I initially read as an open valve. In this way I was continually reminded of water; of how its surface can glint into obscuring flatness or become a translucent container for what moves underneath. And how there is a rhythm to water even when it is still, something natural and cyclical yet elusive and unpredictable.
view22 June 2025
To compound: rigor and surrender, emotion and information.
view20 June 2025
Considering my view of solitude at 32. Corners at 90s birthday parties and sitting behind those holding controllers and silent in a choir on stage and omniscient atop a slide as everyone else scatters back to class at the sound of the bell. Or on a mound. Making a conscious choice to embrace that vantage since it doesn't seem to be going anywhere no matter how far I think it may recede. Felt like that granted some permissions to access a deeper sea where the sediment of those solitary memories can mix with the formal stuff I'm pursuing; that morphology I mentioned. A place where I can declutter reality into something shaped more like the jelly of years.
view18 June 2025
Shower head: thinking about shapes and forms warping and changing in the life of a painting; realizing how important it is becoming to follow my own morphology, how I don't care anymore about whether forms attach themselves to premeditated content. Fluidity of form feels like it is leading to exciting angles on familiar motifs, or actually just that recurring forms are becoming the motifs themselves. The red stream of the shower began as another blanket, or, more accurately, a kind of a blanket/floor hybrid encroaching on a figure in a corner of a room. But that wasn't working, so I painted the figure out in a blob of beige, which led to the oblong oval shape that I thought might become a kind of Charles Blackman-style mirror until I rotated the panel and clocked how the blanket lines flowed from it like a shower head. That also set up an interesting interaction with the edge of the panel, a place to squeeze in the figure in a way I probably wouldn't think to otherwise. Everything in flux always until it's not.
view16 June 2025
Carol Rhodes at Alison Jacques: Found her statement on addressing “peripheral land” pretty fascinating, how focusing on traditionally unseen/ignored/“un-aestheticised” places opened a channel to a new way of seeing for her. Gave the feeling that she was the only one in the world inhabiting that space. Maybe she was. But I think I'm most interested in the mechanics of the periphery, the tangibility of how she worked with it (and how I might work with it). Her drawings and ephemera especially offered a glimpse into how the consistent accrual of source material orbiting her preferred vantage point informed a modular vocabulary with a degree of malleability, decontextualizing imagery anchors just a notch further than the paint would do naturally. Focused, intentional, pure painting toward a clear vision.
view14 June 2025
Two Sisters (1991) by Caroline Leaf: forms comprised of light, shadow, and scratched (film) marks assembling and disassembling. Color feels liable to swallow the scene at any moment after that wonderful establishing swimming shot—simply body and blue, the wake implied only by a line lassoing the figure's head. A generative approach that expands panoramically once the story moves inside the house on the island: the figures aren't of or in an environment, they are the environment. Those base elements distort depth and activate the edges of the frame into malleable terrain where the scene is the subject and vice versa; negative space as fertile ground...
view12 June 2025
Orbiting some fresh formal problems/propositions in a new one today. There's an arm coming from a mass of blue-green reaching up to grab a black line that hangs in a sequence of other black lines descending from beyond the top edge. All of the lines stop before reaching the bottom edge except one that stretches the length of the panel, a lone interrupter of flattened space. Forrest Bess comes to mind, horizon implied. There's something there to be brought forward and back or hidden behind forms like an elusive bigfoot in the woods. It's just that the tone of the thing feels portentous. It can maybe be saved with some levity...
view10 June 2025
In hill—mostly about letting the surface collect and store time. That problem of randomness creeps in again when thinking about that kind of mark accumulation, but in this case it was less random movements and more a repeated sequence of failed explorations. The word terraform felt relevant, not as a title like I originally considered, but as an attempt. An attempt to make something inhabitable. There wasn't going to be a figure in there, but the smoke was a breath that lead to a head stacked over the house, which ultimately gave it that unplanned mesh, that kind of rack focus where the fence becomes a spine becomes a fence.
view8 June 2025
“Charchoune is not so much depicting the world as conjecturing it, conjuring it up. Painting is itself a kind of construction work, he seems to say, just as a building is a kind of composition.”
More Merlin James, the week of Merlin James. But that's ringing clear to me, conjecturing and conjuring. That seems core to why this current direction feels so abundant. It's less the recognizable stuff of observed reality and more a kind of digested mix of the everyday optical and a developed privacy into something constructed, yes, but also preexisting. I keep repeating “outside of time” to myself and coming back to illustration-based work from my childhood: Red Ranger Came Calling, Falling Up—that lived-in staying power, a visual language simple enough to put pieces together in a young mind while appealing to the accumulated wisdom of a well-traveled body.
view6 June 2025
It's becoming about new ways to get the snowball rolling down the hill, about finding worthwhile problems to solve—the existence of Oblique Strategies is making more sense. Especially one I drew today: “Question the heroic approach.” In turning to the small with more confidence, subject matter feels much less important as it becomes primarily a vessel for new ways to explore paint, color, planarity, etc. Later period Serge Charchoune. Speaking of planarity, Stand: a synthesis of thoughts around depth captured in flattened space. There's also something there about purity and muddiness, that delicate gouache and pencil core surrounded by thick olive and black in a heavy hand. Still a glow, but less of a brightness/contrast bludgeon and more of an allowing rather than showing.