view1 May 2025
A reflection on Bough (8x10 inches, oil on panel, 2025) here.
Feels like the truest channel of my creative values in a while, which I find are being clarified more and more by music. In the sounds I'm making, I'm drawn to elongated spaciousness, to stretching my own patience and outlasting my expectations by waiting not just until a plucked note is finished, but until any trace of it is gone before approaching the next phrase. Staving off resolution or predictable wholeness. I think some similar thinking is at play in this painting—there's that blue shadowy form entering the image from the left that is wrapping itself around the figures, maybe protecting or attacking. A line from Yena's poem “Summer Time” comes to mind: “And a handwritten letter, / wrapped in plastic, / visits someone.” I'm interested in that anticipation of a force or a presence, the yielding to it or the resisting of it or the barrier to accessing its content. There's also a bit of fullness versus emptiness, how that blue is almost scanning the figures, either stripping them bare or forming their density in the process. As in music, it is becoming clear where to push and pull, how to subtract just enough to keep the frail bones of a statement intact so that it can be delivered within a structure despite its ephemerality.
view29 April 2025
Took a seat at a table in the Pret near Dalston Kingsland station yesterday to decompress after my shift. After only a couple of minutes, a sunburnt woman in a winter coat with tousled hair dragging a heavy suitcase and cackling to herself about the heat sat down next to me and started talking at me about how to find places with air conditioning in London during the summer. She saw my sketchbook, which was underneath my phone and wallet on the table, and asked what kind of art I made, so I told her, and then she began to scoot closer to me while she lowered her voice into a whisper to tell me that she was a multifaceted designer and that we could make millions together if I was interested in collaborating. I respectfully declined, at which point she made a move with her hand at my wallet. I kind of surprised myself at how fast I deflected her hand and quickly packed my things as the strangeness of the situation reached a climax with her throwing her head back to laugh at my reaction. This kind of scene was apparently not so out of the ordinary for this Pret, because none of the staff budged as I made my way to the bathroom, which is where my instincts took me to escape the situation and collect myself. Took a few deep breaths in a stall and then exited into a communal hand washing area that also doubles as a little hall for people waiting to use the stalls. I went to splash some water in my face at a sink and a different woman—not the one who had tried to steal my wallet, but a gaunt one wearing a gray hoodie pulled over her head—bent down next to me so her head was level with mine. She said something that sounded like “You could've been quicker,” which confused me because I had only been in the stall for all of thirty seconds, so I responded with “Sorry?” to which she said “I accept your apology” in a pretty Gollum-y tone. I replied “No, I mean what did you say before that?” and she responded with “I accept your apology” again, this time bringing her face close to mine. I peeled away and pushed past her out of the bathroom, out of the Pret, and back into the current of a beautiful Dalston day.
view27 April 2025
Ever since talking to Ross about his song “Wall,” walls of different stripes keep showing up in my paintings. Seems like they're organizing themselves; Wall 1, Wall 2, Wall 3, etc. Most recent is one of a figure jumping over or emerging from a big red hill/wall form in the foreground towards an anthropomorphized sky entity (sun? moon?) in the distance that is also reaching back over some blue mountains to maintain contact with the aforementioned red form. The composition almost immediately brought to mind Clarence Holbrook Carter's “Over and Above” series of animals peering over walls at the viewer. What I've painted feels like the inverse of that impulse, like the viewer inhabits the hidden or implied part of the image and the figure is escaping it into the depth of the painting. But also being pulled back at the same time—the unity of opposites, etc.
view25 April 2025
Pleased with how some recent experiments with painting on panel are going. The wood grain with transparent gesso feels like a bit of a revelation. Two elements to react against right off the bat widens the scope of possibility instantly; forward and back, cross-hatching brushstrokes with grain and primed surface, etc. Aubrey Levinthal in my head. There was also a moment where I had a panel I was painting resting on a nail on the wall, which interrupted a first layer acrylic wash so that a little portal to the raw/primed wood remained behind the head of the nail. That felt exciting too and has me thinking about the possibility of stenciling or subtraction in future constructions. I also like that I don't have to stretch a panel—just prime and go. Think they'll be my new home for a while.
view23 April 2025
Wall came from a conversation I had over the phone with Ross where we spoke about bodies in water in art; how water can fragment, suspend, and frame the figure, and how those effects might reflect the viewer. The painting is layered on top of an older painting of a minimized Los Angeles landscape, which remains partially visible in the final image like some detritus floating through and around the figure—I think that overlap gets at something simultaneously jarring and pacifying. “Wall” is also the title of a song by Ross that is often in my head.
view21 April 2025
Ideas are spawning from / relating to / in dialogue with the small, introspective, private moments of my own daily life again. Joe Brainard has been on my mind as something of a North Star: boldness in simplicity, clarity of vision, the sanctity of the internal monologue.
The size of my work is shrinking as my focus narrows too. Self-contained worlds, but ones that can still be further contained by a wider scaffolding. I think that's partly why I'm gravitating towards this mode of focused play with the blank canvas as the ground. The finality of choices left naked like alien life landing in the desert. I think I'm attracted to the care taken within the structure formed by what that exposure implies.
view19 April 2025
Looking at my calendar / sitting on the toilet / taking a shower / thinking about death / thinking about LA / counting to thirty (average length of a month) / counting to thirty-two (my age).
Lovely visit to Jonathan's studio in Hackney yesterday, and that discussion around parameters came up again. Or structure, as Jonathan referred to it. Structure for honing and deepening inquiry. Mine and his have a little bit in common right now, namely the clear-primed canvas foundation with that transparent gesso that leaves a toothy destroyer surface. He puts his faith in the thin dry drag and I go for the fluid line that leaves a little splashy wake on its way around. We talked in both cases about confronting material comfort, the hand making good like a golden child while allowing some humbling at the same time.
Also relevant was a discussion around forgiveness in the process. I'm coming more and more to a process that enjoys raw canvas too much to keep the idea of burying it alive as a failsafe. I'm happy with a built-up history to slosh around on top of when the idea is dense enough, but there's something about clarity of intention that I'm drawn to now, even if that intention is almost guaranteed to become obsolete as it departs my brain through my hand.
view17 April 2025
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view15 April 2025
There's an interview BOMB Magazine did with Sedrick Chisom in May of 2024 where he talks about how, for him, “there has to be a site of disaster in the work” when making a painting that steers it away from the directionless world of endless hypothetical outcomes. That has been in my head a lot this week as I've worked through a couple new ideas. The first came from seeing a solar flare on a walk to the studio—I painted a version of what it lingered as in my memory and it ended up solidifying a bit in paint, its rainbow rings taking on a kind of chainlink feeling. But it was completely lifeless on the canvas, floating there with no apparent context or reason to exist, so I took it off the wall to put aside. But as I did, I noticed that it felt a little like a figure lying supine when it was oriented horizontally instead of vertically. That presented a new path to follow, a new challenge to confront, a more interesting mix of instincts to unpack. It's a bit of a contradiction to try to remain open to wherever the painting wants to go while seeking concrete problems to solve, especially because you can't manufacture those problems intentionally. Or, you can, but then something disingenuous will lodge itself in the paint and you're stuck with it shooting finger guns at you.
Anyway, that painting has enjoyed a fruitfully frustrating journey so far. But I've had another one going at the same time of a blanket in grass (based on visiting Hampstead Heath with Yena last week) that has not yet revealed a good disaster. The whole thing has appeared in graceful hog brushstrokes over well-planned early layers and has settled neatly into the confines of the canvas, which is to say it has no guts. I have given it a couple days to sit though, so we'll see how it feels when I go back in tomorrow, and I do have this one idea that keeps popping up to maybe introduce some mini memories floating over the blanket shape. I'm slightly wary of constructing that as a problem to solve as I just mentioned, but I think it's a vague enough concept that it will take on a shape I can't predict, so I'm optimistic.
If you're reading this, listen to Walt McClements's new album On a Painted Ocean.
view13 April 2025
I think I'm going to spend a while making paintings of the things I see on the ground while walking around every day. I'm usually averse to that kind of declaration for fear that it will harden into rigidity, but I re-titled the aforementioned Uvula by calling it Bag on the ground in Camberwell, and something about that choice just clicked. I have a few paintings in this vein on the go right now, and I am enjoying the process of using humble, discarded objects as starting points for paintings that aren't beholden to observation but still maintain a place-specific character—it feels good to let paint expand these objects until their realities are stretched into discovery while keeping the title grounded in the neighborhoods I notice them in. I'm with Toby in that I don't want my work to simply clarify reality, and this feels like a way to walk that line between looking with care while fragmenting freely.
The ground under my feet also has rich potential in its relationship to the concept of the painting ground, which will be interesting to unpack as I get more acquainted with the language hiding behind this impulse. I also think there's something to the fact that in 2025 everyone on their phones is looking at the ground and yet not looking at it at all. Gazes are shifted downward but are only focused on a foregrounded screen. Might be a good time to try a rack focus and get my eyes trained on the background terrain they're used to blurring.