21 April 2025
Almost four and a half years into painting and I've fully boomeranged back to my instincts, which is to say that my paintings are spawning from / relating to / in dialogue with the small, introspective, private moments of my own daily life again. Don't have a choice. Joe Brainard has been on my mind as something of a North Star: boldness in simplicity, clarity of vision, the sanctity of the internal monologue. Those are my factory settings.
The size of my work is shrinking as my focus narrows like a microscope onto the molecules that make up the dust that settles on the negatives of my memory. Self-contained worlds yet further contained by some wider structure, the scaffolding of my past or the hands that have molded my awareness into its particular shape.
I think that's partly why I'm gravitating towards this mode of focused play with the blank canvas as the ground. The finality of choices layered on top of it and left naked like some alien life landing in the desert. There's love in the care taken with the knowledge of what that exposure implies (maybe that forever should either be taken seriously or not at all).