5 February 2026
Stuck star: returned to the star image in the studio today after the last go at it didn’t work. That’s something I’ve found myself doing for the first time—returning to elements/motifs from failed paintings and re-deploying them. Used to treat references that led to inert paintings as dead weight, but it’s nice to now see that unsuccessful work really can be bent into more interesting shapes. In this case it was by paring down; this one even more than Plane. It’s a small pink star floating near the middle of a panel and sort of spiderwebbing out over a sky blue blotch of watercolor. Now that I think about it, the spiderwebbing feels related to a Lois Dodd painting (Spider Web with Clover and Grass, 2004) I've looked at a lot this week after Louis Block wrote about it in the Brooklyn Rail (it's included in the retrospective he covered). Anyway, I think I like the questions it is asking. Which seem to circle around stability, projection (I see a facade), order, and control.