30 October 2025
I see a lightness (working title): like so many things I've been working on, this again feels indebted to Merlin James (at least in my head). Likely because I spent time studying his 2020 painting Night this week, trying to absorb its sepia-toned treatment, its gentle but decisive subtractive marks, the economy with which it approaches depth and distance, its tonal range and the subtlety of its transitions between contrasting values. But beyond the technical approach (which, after all, I am gleaning from reproduction), I think what also drew me to it was that I have recently become excited by the challenge that working with such vast amounts of negative space poses—what looking deeper into emptiness could do to enrich attention and observation in the work and in an audience. Stretching the panel's limits as a container. I've watched the figure disappear from my work over the past few months and now I'm watching the non-human forms that have taken its place slowly disappear too. Or just step aside. So the shadows in Yena's shower is what my own new work that I'm referencing began with. It diverged in a useful way, mainly when some shapes I was going to initially anchor the bottom of the composition with dropped out, which gave the whole thing a lovely suspended, void-like quality. And cleared the way for the shadows to form a logic based around their range of translucencies.