18 January 2026
Starlight Way (working title): I've wanted to make an all-white painting for a while and have failed at past attempts, but it seems I may have finally found a way into one. Which in my head felt something like approaching the painting as a white Conté crayon drawing on toned paper. The nucleus of the image is based off of a 9 meter sculpture of a scaled model Qatar Airways Boeing 777-9 aircraft around Heathrow Terminal 4 near Starlight Way. The painting doesn't reflect that specific location visually, so there's maybe an angle in tying it to it through the title, but that may change. The important part is what the paint is doing. The explorations of space, value, and line that emerged. I think I can tie those elements back to two works I looked at a lot this week:
Phoebe Helander, Wire Form III (Divided Space) (2026) David Ostrowski, F (Jung, Brutal, Gutaussehend) (2012)
Each of these paintings address space/the picture plane/gravity/color in interesting ways, and while it's unwise to reach for these effects intentionally, I do think what subconsciously drew me to portraying the sculpture was related to these concerns via its position as an object unmooring from the ground while remaining fixed to it. And I think what resulted sits at the center of an axis that acknowledges multiple potential trains of thought without committing fully to any of them—emerging from/being pulled back into a place of origin, crossing/being stuck at a horizon, taking off/crashing, dissecting space/being absorbed by space, and additive line/subtractive line.