view26 August 2026
National Gallery with Toby today, so many lovely moments. But perhaps none more edifying for me than standing with him in front of Degas's Hélène Rouart in her Father's Study (1886). He re-oriented my view on the work and Degas more generally.
For whatever reason, I suppose based on the selected reading I've done and my relatively limited knowledge of his oeuvre, I've always had it in my head that Degas was the generally prettier and more accessible one in relation to Manet. But Toby is quite attuned to his idiosyncrasies, the games he may have been playing within each of his works, and the beautifully confounding logic of his painterly choices. Talk of “incidents and accidents” around recording, of resistance decoding while observing, of the work's relationship to provisionality.
It really is a strange, askew painting. Framings abound, (the edge of the red silk wall-hanging, the glass case containing Egyptian statues, the back of the chair, the literal frame around Corot’s Castel dell’Ovo in Naples), that all collapse and compress into flatness despite suggesting a network of different spatial planes. The glass case in particular becomes a portal, like an open door to a hallway into and through the left side of the composition. And those precarious, gummed up stacks of paper at the bottom left resting on a maroon blob of a surface-table-floor. Green-blue-gray-orange-yellow-pink held together by a few suggestions of edge; the incident. Perhaps not unlike the disheveled spread at the bottom left of Le Déjeuner, actually.
view24 August 2026
“Adorno describes the aspiration of art as 'saying nothing eloquently,' which is the opposite of the contemporary status of art. Every work is so concerned with what it is saying that there is no room for eloquence, a constantly enforced neurotic search for formal meaning that impedes the development of refined expression. By establishing a rhetorical content that distances the viewing subject from the art object, we become alienated from the artwork's actual potential to trigger an experience through an engagement with the materially existing qualities of the work. Art is not about something, it is something.” —Sean Tatol via The Manhattan Art Review, 2020.
view22 August 2026
Ruba brought a copy of Turner's Last Sketchbook (published by Yale University Press London in 2024, a roughly 7x4.5 inch “facsimile of the last known intact sketchbook by J. M. W. Turner”) to coffee. Perfect before my upcoming travels. Amidst the mental clutter that has formed while getting ready to uproot everything again, here was the simple, powerful fact of a practice. On the move with only water and a few colors at hand, his eye hones relationships; between colors, forms and space, forms and material. All with a thinness of application that serves as a constant reminder to revere.
People continue to ask me for directions on the street. One today, six this month, and I would say upwards of thirty across this whole year. Is that an uncommon amount? Feels like it. Especially because I'm definitely not the person to ask.
view18 August 2026
Gendlin gave the name “felt sense” to the unclear, pre-verbal sense of “something”—the inner knowledge or awareness that has not been consciously thought or verbalized—as that “something” is experienced in the body. It is not the same as an emotion. This bodily felt “something” may be an awareness of a situation or an old hurt, or of something that is “coming”—perhaps an idea or insight. Crucial to the concept, as defined by Gendlin, is that it is unclear and vague, and it is always more than any attempt to express it verbally. Gendlin also described it as “sensing an implicit complexity, a wholistic sense of what one is working on”.
view16 August 2026
Saw some more John Smith today at Whitechapel:
Record (2021)
The Black Tower (1985-87)
Blight (1994-96)
Dad’s Stick (2012)
Twice (2020)
Lost Sound (1998-2001)
The Black Tower is the one still lingering. A simple, intuitive construction from elements that I couldn't help but draw painterly parallels from while I watched. I'm first thinking of drawn-out close-up shots of bare blue sky that are then revealed to be a kitchen counter surface or a piece of paper—as the narration and the plot devolve from something linear and trustworthy into a kind of relaxed mania, so do the film's formal elements. I remember one part where the tower's silhouette segments the sky, creating an arrangement of triangles in black and blue, then rhythmically expands and contracts with the sound of footsteps until the blue is compressed into one small triangle in the top left corner, which then also appears to expand and contract as the eye loses track of which shape is the agent of the movement. And so I was thinking about the ground in painting, of toggling containing edges on and off, how extreme close-up manipulate perceived distance, and ways to convey varying sensorial experiences of proximity. It also circles around something that has come up in conversation a lot recently, which I can maybe describe as an acknowledgement of the blind spots inherent to phenomenal perception. Dealing with limits. Now remembering shots of the same tree viewed from a high residential window: bare in winter, green and full in spring, and having its leaves shorn. Hidden things happening despite the witness.
view14 August 2026
Firmly in the floating world after finding a robust Hokusai monograph at Edith's. These are the works that have been with me since:
Girls at their Toilette, from the series Seven Stylish Foibles (late 1790s)
Mountain Tea-house, album-plate from Mists of Sandara (1798)
Pheasant in Autumn from Album from Life (c. 1814)
Incoming waves/Receding waves, from Hokusai manga (1815)
*One of the best artworks I've ever seen...
Turtles in Sayama Pond, from Hokusai manga (1817)
Sunset over Ryogoku Bridge, from Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji (early 1830s)
Mt Fuji from Kajikazawa, from Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuiji (early 1830s)
The Horse-washing Falls, from The Waterfalls (c. 1833)
Suspension-bridge between Hida and Etchu, from The Bridges (c. 1834)
Tiger in the Snow (1849)
It was really my first time swimming in the totality of his work, and the first thing that comes to mind as it settles in my head is rhythm. Rhythms of nature; human inclusive. Devotion to its majestic indifference. Waves, waterfalls, hair, fabric folds, wood grain, turtle shell patterns, bird feathers, shifting clouds, and, of course, geologic formations. His stillness is singular, frozen solid yet flowing. I thought often of Turner's Snow Storm (1842), and it's lovely to think about both of them working at the same time—their timelines overlapped almost completely.
I sent Tiger in the Snow to my dad, and he responded with recently captured images from the Inouye solar telescope that show the surface of the sun in more detail than ever seen before. A network of burnt-golden vortices cycling and spiraling. He was right—it looks just like the pattern of the tiger's fur. I don't find this coincidental; Hokusai's subjects are his own dilating device toward an inner actuality that magnified something elemental. Which I am now noticing in the modular makeup of everything moving.
view12 August 2026
Two balloons sitting in a room.
view10 August 2026
Watched John Smith's The Girl Chewing Gum (1976) this morning, and later my mom sent our family group chat three home movies from 1996. The first was a clip of my dad spraying a hose in the backyard of our second house. Our dog at the time—Spanky, a Border Collie—chasing the stream. Dad standing in a shadow at the edge of the yard, Spanky zigging and zagging around in the flat, pale yellow LA summer light. The camera briefly pans to my mom, who is holding a newborn Grey (then Zach) on her hip. The video is mostly ambient sound, but at the end a voice mutters something unintelligible from behind the camera. The voice doesn't belong to anyone in our family, but was (and still is) a friend.
view8 August 2026
Excerpt from John Berger's essay “The White Bird” (1985):
The evolution of natural forms and the evolution of human perception have coincided to produce the phenomenon of a potential recognition: what is and what we can see (and by seeing also feel) sometimes meet at a point of affirmation. This point, this coincidence, is two-faced: what has been seen is recognized and affirmed and, at the same time, the seer is affirmed by what he sees. For a brief moment one finds oneself – without the pretensions of a creator – in the position of God in the first chapter of Genesis...And he saw that it was good. The aesthetic emotion before nature derives, I believe, from this double affirmation.
Yet we do not live in the first chapter of Genesis. We live – if one follows the biblical sequence of events – after the Fall. In any case, we live in a world of suffering in which evil is rampant, a world whose events do not confirm our Being, a world that has to be resisted. It is in this situation that the aesthetic moment offers hope. That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe. I try to describe as accurately as possible the experience in question; my starting point is phenomenological, not deductive; its form, perceived as such, becomes a message that one receives but cannot translate because, in it, all is instantaneous. For an instant, the energy of one's perception becomes inseparable from the energy of the creation.