view17 February 2026
Have been looking at Eliot Porter's photographic (but very painterly) work a lot this week. The relationships he finds in a thicket of trees or a cluster of fruit feels to me like the equivalent of figurative painting done right, i.e. when it is loose and expansive enough to allow mark-making and material to become the doors through which new ideas emerge from. And his treatment of color is just lovely—he manages to achieve a kind of softness in his saturation that feels less less like an artificial heightening than an organic warming.
view15 February 2026
Image inventory: a toilet sitting in the middle of the sidewalk in Camden, hand prints on a tube escalator handrail, a plane's contrail bent at an an almost right angle, a diagram of an eye that explains the different planes that comprise its lid, two gin and tonics on a table, dead flower arrangement on a park bench, eroded paint on a shed door, a fingerprint filling a square on an ID card, an oblong bench, a lion's face in a gold door knocker, an indent of a flower in blue tack, a can of peas, a red handprint on a window.
view13 February 2026
So much to say about my visit to Eva Dixon's studio. Will slowly unpack everything in time, but the first thing I want to address here is what she said about her work being propelled by not understanding it. A wonderful sentiment in itself, but but most helpful and useful to me was hearing her talk about how maintaining that headspace is a muscle she has developed and continues to train. Because it seems to me that the intellectual side of one's practice is always threatening that vital, joyful mode of working in which there is no analyzing or judging or justifying. In which the creative act justifies itself.
view11 February 2026
Missing (working title): over the past couple of months, I've seen laminated copies of the same missing cat sign pasted up all around Forest Hill. Have probably seen them in four or five separate locations. And each time I've passed them, they've become more waterlogged from the rain. So at this point they are these strange, abstracted images of the same black cat, each one warped and bent in odd directions by bleeding ink and disintegrating paper. In the most recent sighting, the black ink from the cat's back had pooled into a fold at the bottom left corner of the image, which created a right angle effect mirroring the right angle formed by the bottom of the page. Which gave it an almost ancient-Egyptian sphinx kind of feeling, rooted and at rest. Tried to honor the experience of encountering it in paint, and while it's not quite alive yet, it's also not yet dead.
view9 February 2026
Stuck star (or possibly Third man): 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.
view7 February 2026
“I paint to save my life and to kill time.” —Morris Graves
view5 February 2026
For a few years now, I've been steadily accumulating paper/printed ephemera—mail that comes through the door both (personal and junk), discarded magazines and newspapers I find on the ground, ticket stubs, flyers handed to me on the street, etc. I often make collages with them, and it just now occurred to me that it might be interesting to try turning those collages into paintings. The stream of printed material that one encounters in daily life is steady and unending, so there are always new images and words on the way. Always unpredictable and it always comes to you. Even today, just outside my flat I found some sort of origami instruction flyer that demonstrates how to make a butterfly, and later in the mail was a handout decorated with the silhouette of a butterfly zipping around (dots to describe its trail). Direct from the world's river of information.
view3 February 2026
Noting down what Jake (Lamerton) said during his visit about “remoteness.” A useful and interesting word in the context of my work that I had not really pinned before. Came up when speaking about On diversion (which is hopefully going into the show he's curating next month), but I suppose it has always applied as a subconscious aspiration. And I've been feeling it in droves via Lee Friedlander's work, specifically a handful of his many photographs of American landscapes: Livingston, Montana (1970), Knoxville, Tennessee (1971), Victor, Colorado (2001). In these, remoteness is something privately clarifying, all the more rich and attentive for its detachment from the infinite noise and possibility of populated space. Generous in its isolating force.
view1 February 2026
Ornament (working title): the interior of my new house has been unfolding itself more and more. There's a wall hook guiding two sets of fairy lights across the living room that looks like a boy's face gazing skyward. Reminded me of the child in one of Botticelli's Madonna and Child paintings (the one from 1470, one of the handful at the National Gallery in D.C.). The hook and lights became the face's body, and as a full image I think these elements simply became an excuse to riff on the way color is deployed in a work from the Mughal Empire that I found via Luhring Augustine Gallery's archives and have been taken by: Bust portrait of a prince, probably Muhammad Sultan, the son of Aurangzeb (probably by Hunhar c. 1670). It's essentially a Josef Albers. Gorgeous tangerine against a sky blue framed by a fleshy faded orange with touches of pale yellows and greens. Ultimately the painting broke away from that scheme (deeper blues, greens, pinks appeared) and it seems like it became about a kind of tension between the oranges and pinks, maybe a relationship that implies but also negates an optical mix.
view30 January 2026
Star in a bag (working title, or maybe Stuck star or Third man): think I was interested here in trying to fragment plane and form in new (to me) ways. It seems like the approach was to try to paint like collaging, to allow shapes to overlap while trying to retain the questions I initially perceived in my visual source (which was a plastic glow-in-the-dark star cloaked by a red Chinese New Year envelope). Trying to formulate a process that can cause an incidental explosion from a center or axis and then allow me to probe any fun relationships that materialize as a result. To encourage forms to collide and conjoin and echo each other as they expand outward. A kind of polyphony. Have been looking at Schwitters a lot this week, particularly his 1925 collage Untitled (Heures crépusculaires). Stacked blocks of muted values and slices of visual information coalescing into gradations of color and thought.