view4 June 2025
Matador feels like a small breakthrough. Before it came to be, I realized the grid that I scratched into the purple tree idea must have come, (along with Sasnal's pencil scaffolding), from the Daumier work that Merlin James wrote about for Burlington in 2014 that I mentioned a couple days ago: “The grid, visible through the whole design, evokes bars or astragals as it crosses the window, and across the empty canvas behind him, it as it were, depicts itself, suggesting that that surface too carries such a matrix for future composition.”
The tree wasn't working, so I went in over it led by a vague conception of a figure holding a digital camera at an angle to the sky. Memories of Tessa shooting the sun. The grid-like scratches I was painting over had dried, so they created a topography that instantly communicated with the subject matter; the lines crossing through the figure's line of sight compressed the rectangle (“camera”) shape and the face into a space where a difference in depth between them is implied yet confused, and also added an extra element of push and pull as some parts of the lines disappeared with thicker application of paint.
And speaking of application, this one really taught me something about the relationship between brushwork and wetness of the brush, working color in versus sloshing it on top. I'm wary of getting too excited about the particular path that led to a thickened, buzzing look, as I still think careful intention feels almost prerequisite to an uncontrived resolution, but I really do love the textures and time recorded on the surface. Starting to really agree with Eisenman—can't remember where she said it, but I recall her saying something about how important the surface is to the physical experience of the work, to moving with the artist through an image. At this point that feels not just preferable, but essential and generous.
view2 June 2025
Invigorating catching up with Danny for the first time in a few years and talking about music. Gave me the gift of More Water (SBWT). Seemed like there was some parallel between my scaling down, both in subject scope and size, and the way he spoke about approaching his live sets—locking into a groove and letting it run, choosing moments to add color sparingly. I think that's actually exactly how he phrased it, “adding color.” Interesting how his thinking felt similarly time-based to how mine feels right now. Maybe it's a little more obvious with music, but it's true that hitting people over the head with galaxy-brained haymakers over and over is a bad move both in audio and image. Getting the same sentiment from the Padgett/Brainard poetry combination (Pink Dust + I Rememeber) that I've been going to sleep with each night; private everydayness in sequence becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
view31 May 2025
Two paintings materialized today. The first a view of the Honor Oak purple tree through some kind of frame, screen, barrier, grid. Today felt like it was largely about nests, about safety, about home and being seen in the home and seeing the home from afar. Not sure I love one square of the scraped screen lines ducking behind the tree, feels a bit too cheeky, may have to solidify that bit into a glitch pixel blackout.
The second orbits around on a hill: house on a hill, home on a hill, up on a hill. “As the day dissolves.” Pretty delighted by its toy feeling, its playful colors that offset the grandeur of the image; the title should encapsulate that simultaneity. Maybe Terraform.
view29 May 2025
Merlin James. So much to unpack, but for now I'm just noting that his work consistently strikes such a beautiful equilibrium between the personal/specific and the general/anonymous/genre, sits self-aware right in the middle of the paradox, always lightened by humor and weighted by history. It's helping me toward a fresh foundation to get going on this painting informed by the purple tree at Yena and Raina's new flat. Thinking of beginning with a dissolving container, (“Daumier’s famous willingness, even compulsion, to leave pictures unfinished”—James from a 2014 article he wrote for Burlington), but with the tree somehow achieving the centered focus and presence of an Adrian Morris...
view27 May 2025
A Ron Padgett poem reproduced here from his new book Pink Dust, which I picked up recently and have been carrying around with me everywhere. What a gift. I want it to be part of my conversation forever. It appears this poem is untitled, at least in the printed context. I'm going to type it line by line:
I shovel a path
from the porch to the truck
and another around the house
to the back door, stopping
to see if I'm one
of those geezers
who have heart attacks
while shoveling snow,
and when I'm finished
I'm not. Look
at all that snow out there
going down the hill
as far as the eye can see.
view25 May 2025
More Aubrey Levinthal. A couple things in particular. Firstly, I read this on her Instagram from a February 2024 post that accompanies paintings of her partner and child:
“I’m careful to be too personal here usually, privacy feels important, the algorithms certainly don’t like it and I don’t often either. But so much of my work comes from this well of feeling and experience for and with them, and that should never be denied.”
Pretty much exactly how I feel. Despite having my boat rocked into self-doubting waters for a couple years, I'm back to allowing work about the people I care about. It just seems to be a natural thing, and it's nice to hear that echoed by an artist I admire.
Secondly, her words in a press release for an Ingleby Gallery group show she was in last year of artists responding to Bonnard: “And he described seeing from behind his eyes, of capturing the way a first glimpse of a room feels, and the urgency to get that down, the time between seeing it and painting it captured behind his eyelids. It was very freeing and wonderful to read and has stayed in my mind – his work has that authentic distorted response that memory so often has.”
That last bit, the “authentic distorted response,” is what I have been trying to say about what I like so much about Ground, why it feels like a step in a good direction. I never want my choices to feel random, so I think I'm subconsciously wary of that always, but the way representation is handled in that one feels playful and loose without it feeling like a guessing game. Still unforgiving.
view23 May 2025
Jared Buckhiester and Hilton Als on YouTube via David Kordansky Gallery “on the occasion of No heaven, no how, Buckhiester's first solo exhibition with [the] gallery.” Some of the worst recorded audio I've ever encountered, but some ideas have stuck with me nonetheless.
Firstly, I like what Buckhiester said about receiving support/advice from friends to keep working without judgement until the thing you're looking for reveals itself. Second time I've heard that sentiment in the past week. Very challenging to work without judgement when you're trying to keep your work true to an internal compass, thin line between judgement and accountability. But I think what he was saying has more to do with trust in sustained inquiry rather than a sort of blind optimism.
But most interesting to me was how he spoke about surface in his paintings, how he didn't want the surface to interfere with content by reflecting light or becoming too topographic, how he wanted to make sure the work wasn't about the paint itself. Before I had even heard him say that, I did notice (to the extent that I could in digital reproduction) how flat the paintings felt, how they made a point to lay everything bare. Though I am enjoying the materiality of paint in subtle ways more and more, (still feels excessive to cake it on), I respect and can empathize with that approach. It feels honest, generous, and confident. He mentioned Albert York and Albert Pinkham Ryder as touchpoints, which makes sense.
view21 May 2025
Earlier this week I was walking near my studio and noticed a small instant film photo lying facedown in the street. I turned it over and found an overexposed image of two young children standing arm in arm in front of a thick green mass of wall ivy. The whole photo is washed out, but the brightest part is the children's bodies, their forms fused and obscured by a concentration of white light so intense that it renders their facial features undetectable save for slight indications of eyes on the taller of the two.
It's arresting, and it feels familiar; not only does it echo Noah Davis's Mary Jane, a work I internalized after a formative visit to the Underground Museum a few years ago, but its formal elements also align with my painting Ground (the one of Yena spreading a blanket over grass), which I had just started to sketch at the time I discovered it.
When I was trying to find a way into that painting, my main reference was a day where I had an especially challenging morning shift before taking a long, sun-baked bus ride across London to meet Yena at Kennington Park. Watching her make a space in the cool shade of a big tree gave me a jolt of what later came through that photo—waves of softness punctuated by an acute pang of finitude. That's pretty close to what Ground holds for me.
view19 May 2025
This new painting of Yena laying down a picnic blanket is finally doing what I want it to do. Have been trying to paint picnics/blankets for a while now, but have always been caught up in the lusciousness of fabric, the contrast with the grass. The difference in this one is that the blanket shape is made from strokes of very diluted, thin wash, a delicate bloom like a jellyfish hovering over the grass, its shadow anchoring the bottom only (maybe as the last of the unfurling end settles, but also who cares). I also feel good about the way the figure at the top is handled, not too overworked, textural but not obnoxiously so, faithful to the eye but allowing limbs to cut off and abstract as they want. Also glad that real people, real community has become the specificity again. That's right for right now, especially after sensing camaraderie so strongly in Gabe's wonderful work over the past couple of days.
view17 May 2025
Have been so taken with how Gabe spoke about moving back to their childhood home in Portugal in the context of their art, how they're approaching reintegrating into the community as their practice regenerates. They talked about how, as soon as they moved back, they decided to bring their sketchbook and gouache out into the places they have known to simply draw and paint local flowers—literally beginning from the ground up before even thinking about bringing people they've been away from for almost a decade back into their work. A sentiment full of intention and respect, a devotion to the fullness of their process that isn't constricted by time. It had a Letters to a Young Poet effect on me, a valuable reminder that the daily accumulation of careful, focused merging with the small particulars of one's life is a bridge to true north.