view15 August 2025
Saw Morandi's work for the first time at the Vatican in the room dedicated to his work. Spent the most time with one of the drawings (can't remember the exact year and it isn't listed on the Vatican's website, but it was a later period one) and two of the still life paintings: Natura morta (1943) and Natura morta italiana (1957). These works alone hold the span of his inquiry and contribution. The former feels like a more or less traditionally handled still life (at least by his standards), but the latter (hung on the adjacent wall, seen first upon entering the space) is thinner, less layered, more loosely handled, and to me more playful—the gray oval representing the inside of the tallest vessel in the composition floats above a table of the same shape and color; the vessels as wireframes in the way they are so well known in his work. Which is even more evident in the aforementioned drawing, which remains almost like a bead maze even with prolonged looking. To my memory, his work was the only work in the contemporary part of the museum's collection that wasn't overtly religious in subject matter, yet his devotion is so palpable that it feels right at home in that context.
view13 August 2025
The intensity of Michelangelo's The Last Judgment on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel was unlike anything I've ever experienced. The same can be said for the ceiling, but I'm just going to focus on that fresco for now. The sheer humanity of it. A writhing procession of flesh. Flesh is the first word that came to mind when I walked into the room—the way the flesh is handled as the eye descends from the saved in heaven to the damned in hell is a masterfully subtle gradation as the eye travels, but a stark contrast when the piece is taken in as a whole; the bodies in heaven are luminous and lightened, while the devils and hell-bound figures have greyed, darkened, filthy-looking flesh. It's a logical, perhaps inevitable, yet still ineffable effect.
I was also struck by how the gears of the piece rotate through figures and forms acting as links between realms—there are many, but what comes to mind first is the flayed skin held by St. Bartholomew that sags toward the figure becoming aware of his own damnation, who is being dragged into hell by a devil plunging through the air by the weight of the black shadow wrapping his back. This sequencing is an example of how the painting's connective tissue hides in plain sight. It's uncanny in how its spaciousness is jam-packed; sky and clouds suspend its 300+ figures to create an atmosphere that flattens the whole scene into a cohesive tidal wave while still stretching negative space into an all-encompassing container.
But back to the humanity. I recognize that I'm arriving at this outlook from a privileged perspective given how little organized religion has impeded my personal freedoms, but to me the depicted dichotomy between the two afterlives immediately felt first and foremost like a representation of the full possible spectrum of human emotion and sensory experience. From the mystical wonder of spiritually fulfilled souls to the tormented anguish of those doomed by never having served a purpose beyond themselves, I found it to be remarkably rooted in this physical world. Pope John Paul II called the work a “sanctuary of the theology of the human body,” which rings true—the mashed mass of bodies left a brain-like imprint on my memory, almost like each limb was a gyrus coalescing into as complete a picture of consciousness as I've ever encountered.
view11 August 2025
Inventory: Intercoursal bodies, waves, eight-legged organisms, trees, pools, mushrooms, shadows, pigeons, Air Force oath renewal family photo circa 1963 (American flag in the background), reflections in silverware, braiding hair, pen out of ink, hand out of pen, forests, lumberjacks, chips, cuts, cracks, voyeuristic compositions, arrows, wet leaves, holding hands, buzzed hair, cameras, interviews, blood on rocks.
view9 August 2025
Victor Hugo—Taches with fingerprints (1865). A threshold and a hiding and an emergence and a gathering/populating all in one. Pure. Very close to what I am hoping to achieve right now.
view7 August 2025
I would like drawing and painting to fold in on themselves, to struggle for position in a blurred hierarchy. Not drawing with paint, though that's cool. I mean drawing with graphite—interesting when an impermanent material is used in a context that makes it feel permanent. Next to oil paint faces all manner of threats to its purity/existence.
view5 August 2025
In her Brooklyn Rail talk from 2021, Katherine Bradford says Robert Motherwell taught her that color and line were enough, but she also shows a Susan Rothenberg to talk about how the inclusion of a subject, (in Rothenberg's case a horse), augments those formal elements so they're in service of emotion. Have had these ideas top of mind while working on what is currently titled Pre-stake—a tree trunk with an incision or chunk chipped out represented as a kind of abstract red blog, its shape nodding to Holbein's Ambassadors (1533) and Kerry James Marshall's School of Beauty, School of Culture (2012). There's also a bird passing through and sky alluded to incompletely on either side of the trunk. Bradford also talked about making her way through paintings by accumulating formal decisions, and my recent process feels similar. Not an obscuring of the subject, but a way to use it as a container to ask painting questions. So Pre-stake seems an okay title—addressing the moment before something is asserted, set in stone, penetrated in a permanent way. The tree perhaps about to tip, the bird in transit, the forms solid enough to exist but sheer enough to dissolve at a particular vantage.
view3 August 2025
Recent studies: a figure reaching into a hole in the ground, a figure getting a haircut (head, barber cape, chair, mirror), an apple on a laptop, a hummingbird plunging its head into a flower, a couple from an amateur porno sixty-nining (searched “passionate”), used plates and silverware, Rosie sleeping, a network of cameras facing an interviewee, a staircase to a front door through a car window, a child standing on a chair in a bathroom (from Mom's photo archive).
Assembling these subjects like tesserae to come back to content, been a bit bogged down by formal whims. And together they are suggesting something about solitude, yes, but also about: stripping away, rawness, tension between being seen and discarded, anticipation, achieving, falling short, manifesting, ignoring, growth stunted and catalyzed, resting for a minute, resting forever, merging and severing.
view1 August 2025
Little by little with Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content, beginning with the first half of the chapter “The Biography of a Painting” in which he unpacks his work Allegory (1948).
Shahn begins by summarizing Clive Bell's view that “the representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.”
Shahn's take on this: “I have had in mind both critical views, the one which presumes a symbolism beyond or aside from the intention of a painting, and the other, that which voids the work of art of any meaning, any emotion, or any intention.”
I feel it's important to sit with this thought before going further into how Shahn digests symbols in his practice, which has already taught me a lot about forming a more generative morphological armature in my process, because it touches on something I recently spoke about with Danny—the severance of accountability from creation despite their inevitable reunification as work prepares to leave the studio.
I think what Shahn is first showing is how holding intention, audience, and any formalist leanings all at once in many ways hinges on one's devotion to honoring the subject at hand. Which I see as independent from preserving any meaning and more to do with retaining its humanity through inevitable visual extrapolation.
view30 July 2025
Prism: somewhere between Suck (2004) by Merlin James and Hand above Torso (2007) by Co Westerik. Erotic paintings have appealed to me recently as exercises in detaching an image/subject of a painting from the painting's content, which is something I'm broadly quite interested in right now. The friction that comes from resisting deliberate image-making in favor of murkier waters around formal exploration is creatively fertile, especially when that image is sexually explicit in nature—how impassive or subdued can a painting remain when its content predisposes it to attention?
view28 July 2025
Closely Watched Trains (1965) by Bohumil Hrabal