view13 March 2026
Cleaned up my phone's photo library today and found that I've been taking pictures of weather-warped missing animal signs for years. When I think about the recent attempt at painting the one I saw in Forest Hill in tandem with Face shield bag, Third man, Flat window, and On diversion (among many others), it's clear that I'm trying to find a way to address a kind of everyday splicing/segmenting/rupturing of vision. Swan (working title) is one I made today with perhaps a similar concern. From a discarded pack of Swan filter tips I saw on the ground near the bus stop by my studio. The big elegant bird framed and kind of caged by both the package design and the light shifting across its creases. Also, back to Third man—it resolved itself today with a third layer. Became two levels of sheer webbing suspending the star instead of one, which elevated it to something about the holder being held, the patch reinforced from beyond the context of the wound site.
view11 March 2026
Face shield bag (working title): was walking in Vauxhall and found the outer packaging for a set of CPR mannequin shields. Made of transparent plastic, on which was printed a wonderfully-poorly-rendered line drawing diagram showing how to use the product—hands affixing a shield to a mannequin's lifeless face, another (living?) face entering the diagram's second stage to put its lips to the first one. All folded in on itself and resting delicately over sparse weeds sprouting from wet soil squeezed up against a concrete curb. Something about it brought to mind Polke's watchtower series (particularly Watchtower (Hochsitz) from 1984), both in mood—relaxed at a kind of equilibrium but sinister—and visual complexity—the bent plastic packaging caught daylight at odd angles, blocking visibility of the weeds, soil, and diagram here and there. What resulted is a painting that to me feels ancient, like a hieroglyph partially lost to material decay. Which sits in an odd harmony with the satisfaction on the face floating at the top of the composition. The color is indebted to Eliot Porter's Winter Wren, Great Spruce Head Island, Maine (1960), which holds an aspirational kind of long-ago-now-ness that I'm permanently searching for.
view9 March 2026
Richard Serra's Verb List (1967) reproduced here:
to roll to crease to fold to store to bend to shorten to twist to dapple to crumple to shave to tear to chip to split to cut to sever to drop to remove to simplify to differ to disarrange to open to mix to splash to knot to spill to droop to flow to curve to lift to inlay to impress to fire to flood to smear to rotate to swirl to support to hook to suspend to spread to hang to collect of tension of gravity of entropy of nature of grouping of layering of felting to grasp to tighten to bundle to heap to gather to scatter to arrange to repair to discard to pair to distribute to surfeit to complement to enclose to surround to encircle to hide to cover to wrap to dig to tie to bind to weave to join to match to laminate to bond to hinge to mark to expand to dilute to light to modulate to distill of waves of electromagnetic of inertia of ionization of polarization of refraction of simultaneity of tides of reflection of equilibrium of symmetry of friction to stretch to bounce to erase to spray to systematize to refer to force of mapping of location of context of time of carbonization to continue
view7 March 2026
Chair, wall, & pipe: a small collage on two notecards (roughly half of one glued on top of another) in pencil, ink, and acrylic. There’s an outdoor chair outside someone’s studio across from my building at Vanguard that sits against a brick wall, from which protrudes a short length of silver piping. The piping extends parallel to the ground such that it appears to be floating by its own power, like a snake hovering its head/trunk—it looks like it’s searching. Its form mirrors the rhythm of the seat of the chair next to it, almost like the two have simultaneously looked away from each other. But they’re bound by the wall they share.
view5 March 2026
Passed lots of street preachers on my way to poke around the dollar stores in Wood Green today. On my way home, an angry-looking man (vein bulging from a red bald head) emerged from a building with a bag of birdseed, was a few paces ahead of me almost the entire way back. When we got to Wood Green station, he made a beeline for a man monologuing about Jesus through a handheld microphone and then emptied the entirety of the birdseed in a circle around him. The angry man shouted obscenities as pigeons descended on the feed in a big gray flurry around the preacher, who just kept on preaching.
view3 March 2026
Found a £5 National Lottery “£500 Loaded” scratchcard on the ground near Wood Green station (not a winner; apparently the odds are around 1 in 1,400 to win the full £500, meaning you'd have to spend over £7k on scratchcards for a statistical guarantee). Those things are like mini paintings, the topmost layer clawed away to reveal the information hidden underneath. Which is why I picked it up—it's a potent feeling to find and hold such a clear recording of a stranger's touch in your hands. The rhythm of the diagonal scratch marks (this person was probably right-handed) held the urgent speed of them. Spooked me a little, honestly. The palpable charge of hope turning to disappointment. And yet there was something undeniably alive about it. It had been addressed with someone's undivided attention at one point. Going to see if I can make a drawing with one.
view1 March 2026
Image inventory: mug with a speech bubble that reads “I'LL BE OK” over a stick figure lying supine, a chair against a brick wall next to a pipe coming from the wall that isn't connected to anything, toilet paper at a corner shop with a blue bunny on it, a blueberry floating in some oatmeal in a silver soup spoon, a mirror on a fence in a yard showing the reflection of grass split in half by shadow, a flyer with text that reads: “LIZARD PEOPLE (DO WE NEED THEM?),” a sign for a theater comprised of a blue elephant floating in a square.
view27 February 2026
Spread (working title): found a stack of old Polaroids over the weekend that I hadn't looked at in probably a year, and instantly there was a freshness to their format from a painting perspective—the image as a container being contained. Thought of Marisol's 1961 Family Portrait lithograph, of approaching and reacting to the edges of the source and going from there. Ken price too, value absolutes and the neat/organized but skillfully loose layered application in so many of his small ink and acrylic drawings/paintings. The photograph I worked with was of a scene of surfaces supporting half-emptied glasses and bottles at Yena's old flat in Vauxhall. The pheromone-thick air of that night, one of many nights, and the edges on which the images in those memories balance.
view25 February 2026
Using much more printed material as reference/source material this week. And it's finding me—yesterday on my walk back from Jake's studio, I found two laminated print-outs in the street. Both were facedown before I flipped them over to find what was on the other side. One is a handwritten description in waterlogged ink on A6 white paper of a species of tree that is apparently common in Southwark, and next to the description are six purple and mustard-yellow flowers pressed flat between the laminate, each at the center of their own oozing bleed of yellow color that rain has extracted from them. The other is a children-appropriate bingo card on A4 white paper, the bingo squares comprised of low-poly digital renderings of smiling local animals. There's a black and white, sort of yin and yang-feeling logo on the bottom right of the page for a primary school that is a mirrored image of trees where the form of the trees are inverted as their roots (top half is white with black trees, bottom half is black with white roots).
view23 February 2026
Another note on visiting Eva Dixon's studio. Something that struck me was the sheer amount of variables/ingredients/raw materials/formal approaches that are in play at any given time for her to cycle through as she works on solutions for problems past and present. Of the twelve or so works in progress that she had on the wall when I came in, each was touching on problems via material that were related to yet distinctly unique from those of its neighbors. Through metal riveted and shaped, wood clamped and controlled, symmetry enhanced or threatened, images singled out/juxtaposed with another/paired with text/sliced and fragmented, light reflected/sourced from within/avoided, supports pushed and pulled, questions asked around structural integrity, interplay between frame and stretcher and surface, and inquiries into object and body, the work is in a constant state of regeneration, refreshing itself in search of what it hasn't yet tried.