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.
view15 May 2025
A few more words on water—watching these videos of hotel baptisms, I'm immediately brought back to the hundreds of tiny town hotels and motels I stayed in on the road during my baseball years. Maryville, Klamath Falls, etc. Coming back from a game late at night with dirt on my jersey, showering off the results whatever they were. Baseball is a game of failure, as is painting, which is maybe also why I feel like I'm able to view these baptisms for what they are; been having versions of them my whole life with every new game and every new blank surface. When I first began to form a practice, the start-again was a pressurized thing, but now it's a sunny possibility. I imagine being dunked in a Holiday Inn bathtub might achieve a similar effect for someone bogged down by who they've been. I always am that too I guess. For better and worse.
view13 May 2025
Kingdom tub (8x10 inches, oil on panel). Began as a figure in bed, ended up rotating ninety degrees counter clockwise to find the figure's head in the bottom corner, then the bed became a bath and water appeared again. I keep coming back to water.
I think it's because lately I can't stop watching videos of DIY baptisms—in hotel tubs, local rivers, inflatable pools. There's something so vital about people choosing to transform an ordinary domestic or familiar space into a channel for the divine and becoming illuminated by a newfound sense of rebirth or belonging after dunking themselves in the stuff they're made of.
view11 May 2025
Kissing Rosy in the Rain (2021) by Mason Lindahl is the top of the mountain.
view9 May 2025
Thinking about the tracks I've been laying in relation to what Jonathan wrote recently about “the image as a force” and how his work relates to provisionality in painting. While I admire Jonathan's work, I'm finding more and more that I'm not really aligning with the idea of the image as a complete thing to be exported or paintings that overtly engage with provisionality. I realize it's a fine line between those poles, but I feel like I'm sitting somewhere near that line with the approach that a foundational idea must always be there to start with, but a painting only becomes interesting to me once that original idea warps into something extended beyond any neat pictorial promise it tries to make at first.
So I guess this way of working can't help but relate to provisionality in a way, but at the same time, my instincts enjoy fleshing out those unforeseen moments once they appear. It really is like fishing (shoutout David Lynch and Jonathan again), but I guess I want to cook and eat the fish when I catch it.
view7 May 2025
Have also been thinking about intentionality with regard to surface—it seems to me that so many paintings I love do feature surfaces prepared quite intentionally, and yet the way the image ultimately interacts with that surface feels unplanned/unforced. Joseph Yaeger comes to mind again in the way that his forms do feel precise. But the thick gessoed surface creates a topography for the rigidity of those forms to loosen and bounce.
As I've been painting through my own resistance to my original academic figurative foundation, I've been thinking about this a lot; about how I need not obsess over controlling the microscopic play of brushwork on top of the coarse gesso strokes over the grain of the panel to hope for some vibration—it will come as a result of conditions put in place.
view5 May 2025
In The Mood For Love (2000)—what sticks most was how effectively it circled around the main implication/possibility/preoccupation, the patience with which it treated a full exploration of the container for the unfulfilled event, the swirl of conclusions in the mind that prevent them from taking place in waking life. It's an interesting premise for a painting, maybe—what could be a payoff in paint that comes from desire resisted to the point of vanishing, almost as if it was never there in the first place? Maybe a cloud in a transparent box up a ladder in a tree.
view3 May 2025
Jake Longstreth at Max Hetzler, quiet but bold stand-offs between California light and shade. A disorienting thing to be standing in London and immediately feel the familiar naked flatness of the light, especially in paintings like Along I-210 and In Los Angeles (3). Thin and thoughtfully handled all around, but still pretty muscular and with just enough gestural abstraction for flora to become detached floating marks up close, each work expanding and contracting again depending on viewing distance.
Tessa and I both lingered on Los Angeles (4) the longest. The only one in the show with a palpable marine layer, its central Eucalyptus tree having a Wanderer above the Sea of Fog moment looking out over an expanse that reminded us of the view from our parents' house in the Palisades. For me its power lies in how effectively it plays with the softening of perception; the entirety of the tree's form is darkened and dulled, its shadow thrown towards the viewer to imply light falling on its opposite side. But the light's source is that misty expanse, somehow luminous despite almost imperceptibly subtle gray-blue gradations forming the horizon through the haze. Lovely bit of painting.
view1 May 2025
A reflection on Bough (8x10 inches, oil on panel, 2025) here.
Feels like the truest channel of my values in a while, which I find are being clarified more and more by music. In the sounds I'm making, I'm drawn to elongated spaciousness, to stretching my own patience and outlasting my expectations by waiting not just until a plucked note is finished, but until any trace of it is gone before approaching the next phrase. Staving off resolution or predictable wholeness. I think some similar thinking is at play in this painting—there's that blue shadowy form entering the image from the left that is wrapping itself around the figures, maybe protecting or attacking. A line from Yena's poem “Summer Time” comes to mind: “And a handwritten letter, / wrapped in plastic, / visits someone.” I'm interested in that anticipation of a force or a presence, the yielding to it or the resisting of it or the barrier to accessing its content. There's also a bit of fullness versus emptiness, how that blue is almost scanning the figures, either stripping them bare or forming their density in the process. As in music, it is becoming clear where to push and pull, how to subtract just enough to keep the frail bones of a statement intact so that it can be delivered within a structure despite its ephemerality.
view29 April 2025
Took a seat at a table in the Pret near Dalston Kingsland station yesterday to decompress after my shift. After only a couple of minutes, a sunburnt woman in a winter coat with tousled hair dragging a heavy suitcase and mumbling to herself about the heat sat down next to me and started talking at me about how to find places with air conditioning in London during the summer. She saw my sketchbook, which was underneath my phone and wallet on the table, and asked what kind of art I made, so I told her, and then she began to scoot closer to me while she lowered her voice into a whisper to tell me that she was a multifaceted designer and that we could make money together if I was interested in collaborating. I respectfully declined, at which point she made a move with her hand at my wallet. I kind of surprised myself at how fast I deflected her hand and quickly packed my things as the strangeness of the situation reached a climax with her throwing her head back to laugh at the exchagne. This kind of scene was apparently not so out of the ordinary for this Pret, because none of the staff budged as I made my way to the bathroom, which is where my instincts took me to escape the situation and collect myself. Took a few deep breaths in a stall and then exited into a communal hand washing area that also doubles as a hall for people waiting to use the stalls. I went to look in a mirror at a sink and a different woman—gaunt wearing a gray hoodie pulled over her head—bent down next to me so her face was level with mine. She said something that sounded like “You could've been quicker,” so I responded with “Sorry?” to which she said “I accept your apology” in a pretty Gollum-y tone. I replied “No, I mean what did you say before that?” and she responded with “I accept your apology” again, this time bringing her face even closer to mine. I peeled away and pushed past her out of the bathroom, out of the Pret, and back into the current of a beautiful Dalston day.