24 July 2025
A friend made an argument recently for detail in the attention age, and I get it. But I think there's a more subtle angle to take toward slowness and staying power, which I'm beginning to find in the relationship between a painting's tactility and its imaginal qualities. This feels related to memory—how its repeated attempts to solidify experience are wrestling matches with the phenomenological. There's an analogue in working with the materiality of paint and maintaining an awareness of how it speaks to the surface; I'm realizing after reading some of my recent entries here that I don't necessarily mean honing in on a specific kind of treatment anymore, either. Thin, thick, scratched, removed—it's all addressing a reaction between image and paint. A distinctly different concern from the one between image and time.