view10 January 2026
Visited Sebastián's studio, brought him one of the hand-drip coffee bags Yena's father makes. This one was an Ethiopia Geisha with a Manet on the packaging (Woman Reading, 1880-82). When I handed it over, Sebastián immediately placed it among the other objects on one of the still life surfaces in his space. I knew from researching his work and seeing his current show (Lustre at Interval Clerkenwell; if you're reading this you should go see it) that he paints master paintings into his compositions, but it hadn't occurred to me that I was literally handing him a mini master painting. So that was a lovely synchronicity. But I mention it because it speaks to what I feel is the main thing I learned from him, which is how to create a studio that is a self-regenerating ecosystem. If it comes into his space, it becomes part of its orbit and nourishment. I had the sense in there that everything in the space was vital, alive, able to be used at a moment's notice. Which aligns with how he described looking and working with attention and openness, which includes an openness to freely modulating his process through any number of variables including light, objects, and reference works. At risk of sounding dramatic, coming face to face with a world built out so fully altered my thinking around my own practice pretty significantly in that as soon as I left his space, I began to think more carefully about what it is that I don't have to think about at all (or what is lodged at my core). Into my head then popped William Eggleston's famous Greenwood, Mississippi work (1971, the one of the light bulb on a red ceiling). There's a similar bulb in the room at my new flat. It has always been about light (and looking democratically), I think.
view8 January 2026
Spent a lot of time today with Sebastián Espejo's work while preparing to speak with him at his studio tomorrow. Very interested to hear about how he reconciles his routine and moment-of-looking-based practice with taking multiple months, even years to make his surfaces. The relationship between the specific moment of looking and the image accumulated over extended time, of renewing and revisiting. Have also been introduced to the Chilean painter and writer Adolfo Couve through him—a gift, a new way to look at gray (and red) that will require a much deeper dive at some point soon. Can't wait to get into his writing too.
view6 January 2026
Green wood: Originally conceived as an enlarging and flattening of a small scene reflected in a bulbous green vase at my new Wood Green house. Learned that “green wood” is the phrase for freshly-chopped wood that hasn't dried out yet (nice alignment with a cut flower stem). Floating feeling of little lights traveling from a surface tension to darker depths. But the painting itself became about dueling material impulses. Thick application versus thin staining, muted tones versus the strong light source(s), measured marks versus ones made with physical momentum. Palette indebted to Joe Brainard's Whippoorwill (1974, the one at The Met). A close examination of that painting, at least from what I can glean in reproduction, reveals a careful, considered back and forth between the warmth of the early layers and the cool topmost ones. The eye also boomerangs across the composition—controlling and playing with that movement is a way to work. And at the bottom of the image, the brown masses that are the floor and the sofa frame sandwich the loveliest slivers of color in the tiny space between them—I hoped something similar would happen in my work, and I think it kind of did in a more obvious way with some red watercolor peeking through. That handling of color, of restrained use in small space, is attractive and something in itself. Happened in On diversion too.
view4 January 2026
Slugging (show title, travel images)
Flat light (show title, UK flat interiors)
Domestic Product (show title, domestic interiors)
Pretext (show title)
Here's Looking At You (show title, travel images)
On Diversion (show title, travel images)
American Manicure (show title, UK images)
view2 January 2026
Spent significant time with Uccello's Battle of San Romano (1438-40) at the National Gallery today, was transfixed by it. I remember reading about it in the Guston book I Paint What I Want to See, particularly the bit where he highlights how lovely it is to reconcile the depiction with the sensation. That is, for example, how the physics of the piece are in service of the sensation of the piece, not the other way around. I think he says something specifically about the mass of horse legs on the left of the painting, how it's kind of impossible to parse them, but that parsing them is beside the point. For me, the spatial exploration was the thing. It is restless in its asking of spatial questions. Any given element of the piece represents a problem probed to the artist's limit—the foregrounded knight lying facedown is the glaring one, but the lances throughout create a logic and a wireframe structure for the entire thing to play off of (that also extends beyond the work—the lances rocket the eye out of the frame over and over). And the color was wonderful. Apparently it has faded quite a bit over time (greens have turned black, vermilion has turned blue-grey, flesh has turned green, etc.), but to my eyes that just made the luminous bits (oranges, whites, pinks, blues) pop even more. And the last thing I want to mention here is the emotion of it. Bizarrely (but satisfyingly) neutral. A leeching of Uccello's personality in service of the formal issues he was working out. Which gives the whole thing a frozen air, like a scene paused and analyzed under a microscope.
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.