1 July 2026
Bel sito (working title): 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 the same shade of gray-blue (leaving light out of the picture, for now) 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 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 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.