19 June 2026
Attempted a painting today based on the fragmented reflection of a plane on wet tarmac that I saw while boarding a recent flight from London to Venice. Primed the panel with a left-to-right gradient from a bright yellow to a dense black—the idea was to then slowly layer loose/thin form lines over the gradient from bottom to top in a relatively monochrome gray-blue palette and see what rhythms and shapes cohered as the whole thing took on a sense of motion. An okay idea, but it just didn't work. Having a practice means constantly rewriting one's own rules, and it feels like I've done a bit of over-defining in recent days that made me rigid in my approach. So it's time for a break from the studio for a while in the interest of recalibration and refocusing.
But what I can say now, for when I resume, is that there needs to be some kind of reckoning as far as my handling of color and its relationship to the logic I've been discovering. Destruction as well as building, (while it now feels overly representative to me almost eight months later), is perhaps a good work to go back to. That one set a baseline for accumulated tactility in conjunction with early watercolor layers that are constantly shifting underneath and weaving in and out of the topmost oil layers so that there's an optical softness even with clarity of form. And when I think about the work I now want to make, which is work that is free to break away from my visual references by way of every formal element considered in a delimitation stack while still remaining true to an invisible structure of observed logic and felt emotional resonance, that might be a place to restart. Forms that float, reorganize themselves and react to each other, cause friction between background and foreground as well as flatness and depth, and ultimately create a self-regenerating mesh of lived-in experience and presence.