view1 August 2025
Little by little with Ben Shahn's The Shape of Content, beginning with the first half of the chapter “The Biography of a Painting” in which he unpacks his work Allegory (1948).
Shahn begins by summarizing Clive Bell's view that “the representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.”
Shahn's take on this: “I have had in mind both critical views, the one which presumes a symbolism beyond or aside from the intention of a painting, and the other, that which voids the work of art of any meaning, any emotion, or any intention.”
I feel it's important to sit with this thought before going further into how Shahn digests symbols in his practice, which has already taught me a lot about forming a more generative morphological armature in my process, because it touches on something I recently spoke about with Danny—the severance of accountability from creation despite how one must always be held accountable for work that leaves the studio.
view30 July 2025
Prism: somewhere between Suck (2004) by Merlin James and Hand above Torso (2007) by Co Westerik. Erotic paintings have appealed to me recently as exercises in detaching an image/subject of a painting from the painting's content, which is something I'm broadly quite interested in right now. The friction that comes from resisting deliberate image-making is creatively fertile, especially when that image is sexually explicit in nature—how impassive or subdued can a painting remain when its content predisposes it to attention?
view28 July 2025
Closely Watched Trains (1965) by Bohumil Hrabal
view26 July 2025
A painting should be organized (and ideally re-organized, but more on that later). Of course there's a spectrum as far as what that means for each artist, but what I mean has something to do with the constraining friction between a clear guiding impetus (formally, conceptually, or both) and conviction in a thoughtless hand combined with a conscious/palpable resistance to habitual or comforting choices.
view24 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.
view22 July 2025
Amulet continued: surprised that it resolved itself as well as it did. It's successful, but walks a dangerously thin line; forms moving in and out of each other can so easily skew stylized and superfluous. But I think it works because its anchor is firmly planted in exploring color relationships and negative space, which allows for a little more liberty with shape and form. Indebted to Milton Avery in general, but especially in conversation with Red Rock Falls (1947), I think.
view20 July 2025
Amulet: the logic that governs what this painting is becoming is fresher and less encumbered by achieving muscularity than anything surrounding it in the studio. These forms are ghostly (aside from the black squares, which may have to change) and in touch with negative space in a way that feels related to their guiding concern, which I suppose is memory. The ember of a thing from a faraway past still burning despite how small and foreign it might seem to me now. Something luminous and formative, yet dulled and disintegrating through its translation into paint (and therefore the present).
view18 July 2025
Rosie (after Joe Brainard): in memory of Rosie through the lens of Brainard's Untitled (Whippoorwill) (1973-74), a portrait of Kenward Elmslie's whippet (one of a handful he did of the dog. All are lovely). There are the paintings we make to share, and there are the paintings we make for ourselves first and foremost. This one belongs to the latter category, though I'm not ruling out the former necessarily. It's just the first time in a while that I've honored a realist impulse, which felt appropriate for this tribute and is why I chose Brainard as a starting point. I never knew him personally, but the way he sees animals in his work intuitively feels similar to my relationship with them—as pure as a thing can be and something that should stand on its unembellished own. I miss Rosie.
view16 July 2025
Scope: Deeper into the seams that bind line and paint, interior life and landscape. This time through the eye of a penitent or hopeful apparition. We're lined up in her gun sight, the grass well-watered, a cloud or halo coming to.
view14 July 2025
On the heels of talking to Danny and the resulting R.B. Kitaj references, I'm thinking about compositional fracturing, of the regeneration of motifs through optical strategies. Wish I had given Danny a little more space to unspool that thread through the lens of his current subject matter, and I suppose that's partly why I'm noting it here. In any case, for me much of his work's dynamism comes from the patience with which he coaxes light, color, and form into an equilibrium that generates meaning through becoming, and the way he is beginning to repeat motifs in that process is allowing for the structure of the motifs themselves to become malleable. That's exciting. I find that in Kitaj too, in the way his figures often seem to sprout from or imply an underlying geometry.