25 July 2026
Autopsy (working title): a small 8x10 inch painting of what began from close observation of a peeling decorative vinyl house address number I saw on a Wood Green recycling bin. 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, or a fake garden and a projection of a butterfly, or two visitors trying to mirror each other, or experience shifting into two dimensions (less time with the act, more with the storage). Serendipitously found a wax seal on an old envelope as the impulse to add an insect in flight arrived (it really helps to keep anything and everything around; ideas don't die but they hide). Yena said she has been writing about seeing cicada shells on the ground during walks in her neighborhood. I could also say that this work feels like childhood revisited with new tools, or a compressed and frozen metamorphosis, or a record of an imprinting. So content is coming around (by which I mean I'm not even considering it anymore), but I feel that the materiality needs to hurry up and dissolve. 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).