23 July 2026
Autopsy (working title, maybe Even odds): a small 8x10 inch painting of what began from close observation of a peeling decorative vinyl number I saw on a Wood Green bin and became a kind of totem upright in the night (memories of standing at the base of Sankaty Head Light). Or a garden and a butterfly/a promise of a garden and a projection of a butterfly/an environment and a visitor/a simulated environment and an apparition/memory shifting into two dimensions from three. Or two fates. Serendipitously found a wax seal on an old envelope as the impulse to add an insect in flight arrived (keep everything around, keep everything around). Yena said she has been writing about seeing cicada shells on the ground in her neighborhood. I could also say that this work feels like childhood given new tools, or a compressed and frozen metamorphosis, or a record of an imprinting. Content is coming around slowly (by which I mean I'm not even considering it anymore), but the materiality needs to catch up to it. I'll let this one stand regardless—it's an okay waypoint and painting is logrolling.
“As a very young man he had spoken of his art as “andacht zum kleinen” (devotion to small things). In the Microcosm of his own visual world he worshipped the Macrocosm of the universe. This was his revolution.” – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy on Paul Klee in the introduction to Praeger Publishers' 1972 print of his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).