1 May 2025
A reflection on Bough (8x10 inches, oil on panel, 2025) here.
Feels like the truest channel of my values in a while, which I find are being clarified more and more by music. In the sounds I'm making, I'm drawn to elongated spaciousness, to stretching my own patience and outlasting my expectations by waiting not just until a plucked note is finished, but until any trace of it is gone before approaching the next phrase. Staving off resolution or predictable wholeness. I think some similar thinking is at play in this painting—there's that blue shadowy form entering the image from the left that is wrapping itself around the figures, maybe protecting or attacking. A line from Yena's poem “Summer Time” comes to mind: “And a handwritten letter, / wrapped in plastic, / visits someone.” I'm interested in that anticipation of a force or a presence, the yielding to it or the resisting of it or the barrier to accessing its content. There's also a bit of fullness versus emptiness, how that blue is almost scanning the figures, either stripping them bare or forming their density in the process. As in music, it is becoming clear where to push and pull, how to subtract just enough to keep the frail bones of a statement intact so that it can be delivered within a structure despite its ephemerality.