view24 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.
view22 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.
view20 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.
view18 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.
view16 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.
view14 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 news of this to my love
room where I could hold it in private. Man
I warped it and praised it and gave it long names
and 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 best friend used to live
view12 April 2026
For the past few months, my studio days have almost exclusively been starting with material and formal questions, and that has led to an invigorating and enjoyable way of working that I think is producing interesting and exciting work. But I think it's important to note here—for myself more than anything else—that I don't see myself as taking a formalist approach to painting in any rigid or traditional sense. Because I do hope that each piece I realize can access different and specific emotional registers by carrying a strong sense of the multitude of feelings I may have cycled through while making the work. Not that it matters whether the feelings are mine or not; the only condition is that they are fully felt and honored.
view10 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.
view8 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.”
view6 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.