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21 February 2026
Really good recently:
Traktor—EP (1995) Bill Wells & Maher Shalal Hash Baz—Osaka Bridge (2006) Dadamah—This Is Not a Dream (1995) Caroline Shaw/Attacca Quartet—Orange (2019)
21 February 2026
Really good recently:
Traktor—EP (1995) Bill Wells & Maher Shalal Hash Baz—Osaka Bridge (2006) Dadamah—This Is Not a Dream (1995) Caroline Shaw/Attacca Quartet—Orange (2019)
19 February 2026
Re-reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man right now in small increments before I go to sleep each night. About halfway through right now. I think the rugged realism of Joyce's language and the malleability of Stephen's conscience is having a particular (but ineffable) effect on my dreams. Last night I had one in which I walked through a kind of clearing and reached a beach. From the sky to the ground, half of the beach was covered in shadow and the other half in blindingly bright light. In the light some people played volleyball, and in the shadow my father was sitting in a black hoodie with his back to me. I walked over to him, helped him up, and together we walked into the light to join the game.
17 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.
15 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.
13 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 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, physical mode of working during which embodied momentum overtakes analyzing or judging or justifying as the creative act justifies itself.
11 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.
9 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.
5 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.
3 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 private and clarifying, all the more rich and attentive for its detachment from the infinite noise and possibility of populated space. Generous in its isolating force.