20 May 2026
Upper crust (working title): rubber ducks becoming animated towards a source/void. That began as a plug. I've been pretty stuck on a Graham Little gouache on paper painting from 2021 of a squirrel called Untitled (Squirrel) this week. Apparently he found a dead squirrel while cycling and kept it in his freezer for three years.
In the work the animal is on the left of the composition encircled by its own tail, peacefully at some kind of rest. There's a transparent triangle shape floating over or on part of the squirrel, looks like something cut out from one of those geometry templates required for high school math classes. It's connected by two thin lines pulled taut across the work that criss-cross into a little cluster of smaller triangles connected to tiny trompe-l'oeil nails; the effect is something like miniature barricade tape. Then just above those, there are sort of clumsily calligraphic marks that wind their way up to an ornamental glass object with a pine cone looking head that might be a stirrer or needle or pin. The feeling of the whole thing is something close to what I remember from seeing the Pietà in Rome. Delicacy in death. That's a heck of a comparison, I know, but it's the first thing that came to mind. Dürer's watercolors of animals too, of course.
Anyway, these ducks I went for were not destined for that kind of accuracy. There's been a desire recently to create a kind of generative soup, boil it, and then catch the bubbles before they pop to comprise the image. But I have to be careful not to create this environment for no reason. It could be that the next one causes a counter-reaction through rendering.