view16 October 2025
It occurs to me as I'm keeping on with this new body of work that, of the ten or so paintings I have around, only one is depicting a recognizably human figure. And yet the others still essentially feel like surrogates for the figure in their presence, physicality, and nonintellectual genesis—these are embodied scenes that are derived from and digested by the senses first and foremost, which seems to increase their ability to carry information about space and time that would otherwise be hampered by something deliberately chosen, pre-judged, or symbolically addressed. I think cultivating this trust in a naturally occurring subject matter via deliberate but open-ended tuning to and awareness/observation of everyday life is becoming really important for clearing the way toward getting at deeper problems of image and representation in paint.
view14 October 2025
”...To experience commitment as the loss of options, as a type of death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress—this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end...”
From page 103 of Something To Do With Paying Attention by David Foster Wallace (the work is actually untitled, but was given this title by McNally Editions when they published it).
view12 October 2025
Working on a currently untitled painting that began after re-watching my mother's 2014 documentary Getting to the Nutcracker. Near the end of the film: transition after transition from backstage to performing, from dark to light, from solitary to grouped, from naked to clothed. Aligned with my recent study of Ed Ruscha's 1965 drawing Normandie—revisiting something familiar in a newer, simplified, contrasted, uncorrupted, willfully surface level way. LA. Harsh re-looking, re-considering, re-looking again. Negation again too, this time of information stored. A hard drive wiped clean. Stretching the thing further and further away like time has until it becomes an artifact represented in binary notation...digging things out of the luggage sitting in my studio, I found quite a few letters and stamps, including the 1984 signed Christo postcard that Stanley Hertzberg gave me commemorating the wrapping of the Pont Neuf.
view10 October 2025
“I have eliminated all text from my books—I want absolutely neutral material. My pictures are not that interesting, nor the subject matter. They are simply a collection of 'facts'...” —Ed Ruscha
I keep encountering artists who describe their practices as being concerned with presenting factual information, which is interesting to me when considering the impulse to make a work in the first place. Because that impulse is rooted in a void, a lack of control. Which to me is predicated on an inherently personal set of formative life experiences, the remembrance of which is almost entirely internal/subjective/self-defined. So maybe factuality, in relation to visual work, is when specificity of circumstance meets the isness of an image such that one is separated from their conception of their individuality yet pulling purely from it.
view8 October 2025
In real time (working title): based on a recent visit to Rob Calvert's studio in Sag Harbor, during which he showed me a painting he made after a dreaming of an acid-washed mushroom cloud overlaid with a ghostly windmill. I think top of mind is capturing a similar effect that appears as a concrete visual certainty while retaining a provisionality that allows the painting to play not just with optical focus, but with the reliability of the image's logic. Which in this case has turned into an attempt to cancel out the conceit of the central plume, which is trying to locate itself at a dominant center. Maybe it's about looking into how close its context can come to impersonating it.
view6 October 2025
Destruction as well as building: decay and breakdown, as an organizing factor, through tactile application of paint, removal of paint, and accumulated touch. Rawness too. Midnight in Calvin's room, a theater and an event horizon. Light not as an indirect luminosity this time, but a directly applied (and removed) material with a separate identity from the initial layers. “Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it.”
view4 October 2025
Tumbleweed: Began as a rendering of my wallet, turned into an exercise in edges, light, geometry, transparency, layering, and subtraction. One of the purest cases of “sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it” (just going to keep quoting Johns). this an example of the latter. Which reinforces the inherent instability of habit in painting, how hammering a single source or relationship doesn't move anything forward. But an earnest openness and excitement toward new ways to work around forms as wireframes might.
view2 October 2025
He really hugs back: the image is based on a frame from an early aughts anti-meth commercial my father made for the Wyoming Department of Health in which a man is bound to a chair with his hands behind his back while another man in a long white lab coat handles sharp silver medical tools and explains to him how he will die a slow, excruciating death of gradual dismemberment and decay. I was initially drawn to the stark, contrast-y establishing shot image because of the strange camera angle and the dissonance between the apparent seriousness of the scene and the man's momentarily peaceful countenance (he panics and pleads later). But as I worked with it, I began to think about the transference of images. Not just in mass media/communication, but across generations. The shifting of the image's stated purpose from my father's initial handling of it as part of a public service announcement to my own reflection and expansion on it nearly two decades later in the context of my practice.
view30 September 2025
More Jasper Johns from Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1996), in which he discusses his interest in “...Leonardo's idea ('Therefore, O painter, do not surround your bodies with lines...') that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” Shifting focus, the lie of form fixed in a space.
view28 September 2025
“On diversion”—one hears this phrase over the announcement system on London buses when they need to skip a chunk of stops for one reason or another, and I've been thinking about it in relation to painting; beginning with a destination for each work, losing control of where it is going, and (hopefully) ultimately finding an unexpected resolution is an obvious parallel. But directly thinking about diversion as its own throughline in painting seems like it could be generative in that it is wrapped up in negation—of ideas, of instinct, of rational reasoning—in the act of making. Or maybe suspension is a more appropriate word, because if negation is a by-product of self-awareness, maybe holding those ideas, instincts, and rational trains of thought while simultaneously resisting their pull is implied.