view31 December 2025
Worth noting that the last couple of days in the studio have been a slog. Felt strained, way too attached to particular outcomes to drop into any good painting flow. But I took today to fill the well and I think it was the medicine I needed. Tightening the grip, (a stubborn approach to discipline, trying to force my way into noticing/documenting/research), never results in good work or affords me deep focus. So I spent the day in the city exercising, walking, watching, listening, and then went home to cook. Revisited Jesse's 2022 interview with Daniel Arnold for his Apology podcast and Daniel mentioned how his ideal state for creating is to “function as a ghost,” that it's important for him that his work comes from a place where it is incidental/unconscious. Was nice to hear him explain how he has trained the muscle of trust in his non-analytical brain over time, hadn't really heard it put that exact way before. I think that's a crucial point, that switching between the survivalist, concrete idea oriented, logical, decision-making brain and the unthinking, flowing, relaxed, unknown-embracing creative brain is a skill in itself.
view29 December 2025
Seen while commuting to the studio today: a hollow rectangular yellow road divider on its side, sun on it from an angle that threw a slanted shadow across its inside. Tall silhouetted street lights repeating in the reflections of flat windows. A single skinny street light framed and floating in the clouds (partial reflection while looking out the bus window). A gray chicken wing eaten clean on the bus floor by my feet.
view27 December 2025
On the plane from Lisbon back to London, a bit of red-brown hair belonging to the woman in front of me curling around the back of her seat to my tray table, sun shining on it from the window. When I looked closely, I could see little rainbow dots pocking the glinting tops of each lock loop.
view25 December 2025
To inhabit different points of view.
view23 December 2025
Terminal advertisement (working title): a painting put into action today based on seeing that aforementioned Brazil tourism ad of Christ the Redeemer while on a moving walkway on my way through Heathrow. There's something emerging in the studio about the reconstruction of particular moments of seeing that I hope is beginning to stretch beyond the full stop stillness I have perhaps tried to capture in the past. And I think it has to do with identifying imagistic planes that somehow relate to the multiplicity of specific lived sensations. In the recall of the kinds of scenes I'm inclined to paint, I'm finding—through photos, sketches, and memory—that there becomes a kind of 360 degree inventory of phenomena that holds possible planar ingredients. And while I don't want to fall into the trap of manufacturing those ingredients, I do think they are worth noticing. In Flat window, they were represented by a combination of perceptions related to reflections, barriers, borderlines, and changes in light that became essentially a sequence of transparencies to layer on top of one another toward a hybrid image.
In this painting today, it seemed like the phenomena were less distinct and perhaps manifested more as a melding of planes rather than a separating and layering of them. I think I can trace this to the experience of seeing the advertisement itself: the micro shifts in fluorescent light bouncing off of the vinyl image as I passed it, the ambiguous tonal environment around it that seemed to blend into a big neutral goop, seeing the seams between each vinyl panel and then losing them again—those were the bits of recall that became planar and then united in shapelessness, the Christ figure a strangely warping and beckoning bit of solidity swimming in and around them.
view21 December 2025
Devotional objects in my room at my new flat, a week since moving in:
My great grandfather's watch that my mother restored and gifted to me (Gruen, 1936), the white linen Ruba gifted to me (underneath the watch, forming a bed for it), the Korean celadon ceramic turtle Yena gifted to me, my yellow-orange telecaster that my father gifted to me, the antique Italian bronze candleholder (currently being used as an incense holder) that Yena gifted to me after her most recent trip to Venice, the house slippers that Yena gifted to me, the family photos (a mix of photos dating back to the early 90s comprised of Polaroids, photo booth photos, and prints of my mother's film photography) that I have mounted on the back of my door.
view19 December 2025
Green wood
Let's go see the wild berries at the pub
and the trash at the courtyard for
the stone cracking sideways in the rain
we can share bread with gnomes
hurrying their way back to families
no stopping to think about it later and later
when we met we stepped in a bucket
a crow cocked its dream around your neck
and into the underpass flew pleasure
view17 December 2025
It's becoming clear that my process outside of the studio is just as important as inside it. I guess that has always been the case, but it's glaring now—the difference in the quality of work I create when I allow myself the space to cycle through the natural stages of a seed of inquiry sprouting organically versus just hard-headed, research-oriented hammering away is obvious. Painting is about striving to live with such fullness of experience and such attention to detail that the work becomes inevitable, because to hold it would be to block a vital passageway. If there's an appropriate balance of making and living, then the work itself will be alive.
view15 December 2025
So much of what I've been working through recently has had to do with reconciling seeing while in motion with the fact of paintings as inherently stable and framed objects. Thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to turn that on its head and see if I could approach an image in the opposite way. That is, seeing something that is normally in motion through a stable lens, maybe even an indifferent or exclusionary one. Thought of Peter Saul's Yellow Car (1957) as a successful example of this line of thinking. Dovetailed nicely with all of the documenting I've been doing of cars—they're central characters right now. But that angle failed today, twice, to become a fertile bed for anything interesting. Might have to do with a misguided intention, a way of seeing that is trying too hard to prove itself as implicit.
view13 December 2025
Another significant bit in the New Models podcast episode mentioned in the previous post was Allado-McDowell's mention of Edward Steichen's landmark photography exhibition The Family of Man (first shown in 1955) as an early example of a “multi-channel environment” in which, due to its dynamic installation, a viewer could in theory produce their own subjectivity via the way they chose to navigate the presentation. This led to further conversation on how media constructs physical space as well as information—the television gathering people in a living room. Naturally this led me to think about paintings as organizers of space, information, and subjectivity. There's room to push this further in my work, maybe experiment with a more tenuous approach to cohering my spatial recordings, see how far they can bend before they break. David Salle immediately comes to mind as a potential tangential relation.