28 January 2026
Star in a bag (working title, or maybe Ornament): think I was interested here in trying to fragment in a new way. It seems like the approach was to try to paint like collaging, to allow shapes to overlap while remaining as faithful as possible to the logic I initially perceived in my visual source (a plastic glow-in-the-dark star cloaked by a red Chinese New Year envelope). To cause an incidental explosion or a breakdown from a center or axis and then probe any relationships that materialize beyond the hand. To set something in motion so that forms collide and conjoin and echo as they expand outward. A kind of polyphony. Have been looking at Schwitters a lot this week, particularly his 1925 collage Untitled (Heures crépusculaires). Stacked blocks of muted values and slices of visual information coalescing into gradations of color and thought.