view8 October 2025
In real time (working title): based on a recent visit to Rob Calvert's studio in Sag Harbor, during which he showed me a painting he made after a dreaming of an acid-washed mushroom cloud overlaid with a ghostly windmill. I think top of mind is capturing a similar effect that appears as a concrete visual certainty while retaining a provisionality that allows the painting to play not just with optical focus, but with the reliability of the image's logic. Which in this case has turned into an attempt to cancel out the conceit of the central plume, which is trying to locate itself at a dominant center. Maybe it's about looking into how close its context can come to impersonating it.
view6 October 2025
Destruction as well as building: decay and breakdown, as an organizing factor, through tactile application of paint, removal of paint, and accumulated touch. Rawness too. Midnight in Calvin's room, a theater and an event horizon. Light not as an indirect luminosity this time, but a directly applied (and removed) material with a separate identity from the initial layers. “Put a mark on it. Put another mark on it.”
view4 October 2025
Tumbleweed: Began as a rendering of my wallet, turned into an exercise in edges, light, geometry, transparency, layering, and subtraction. One of the purest cases of “sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it” (just going to keep quoting Johns). this an example of the latter. Which reinforces the inherent instability of habit in painting, how hammering a single source or relationship doesn't move anything forward. But an earnest openness and excitement toward new ways to work around forms as wireframes might.
view2 October 2025
He really hugs back: the image is based on a frame from an early aughts anti-meth commercial my father made for the Wyoming Department of Health in which a man is bound to a chair with his hands behind his back while another man in a long white lab coat handles sharp silver medical tools and explains to him how he will die a slow, excruciating death of gradual dismemberment and decay. I was initially drawn to the stark, contrast-y establishing shot image because of the strange camera angle and the dissonance between the apparent seriousness of the scene and the man's momentarily peaceful countenance (he panics and pleads later). But as I worked with it, I began to think about the transference of images. Not just in mass media/communication, but across generations. The shifting of the image's stated purpose from my father's initial handling of it as part of a public service announcement to my own reflection and expansion on it nearly two decades later in the context of my practice.
view30 September 2025
More Jasper Johns from Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (1996), in which he discusses his interest in “...Leonardo's idea ('Therefore, O painter, do not surround your bodies with lines...') that the boundary of a body is neither a part of the enclosed body nor a part of the surrounding atmosphere.” Shifting focus, the lie of form fixed in a space.
view28 September 2025
“On diversion”—one hears this phrase over the announcement system on London buses when they need to skip a chunk of stops for one reason or another, and I've been thinking about it in relation to painting; beginning with a destination for each work, losing control of where it is going, and (hopefully) ultimately finding an unexpected resolution is an obvious parallel. But directly thinking about diversion as its own throughline in painting seems like it could be generative in that it is wrapped up in negation—of ideas, of instinct, of rational reasoning—in the act of making. Or maybe suspension is a more appropriate word, because if negation is a by-product of self-awareness, maybe holding those ideas, instincts, and rational trains of thought while simultaneously resisting their pull is implied.
view26 September 2025
“I’ve always tried to define parameters for the drawings or paintings according to some organizing principle. It can be anything from an idea about acoustic space to the color range of a particular pigment. The goal is to construct a picture that is autonomous and at the same time suggests multiple associations or readings. That’s the tension, that’s where the traction is. Between image and organizing principle.“—Terry Winters
This quote was included in the release for Table of Contents, Winters's 2021 show at Matthew Marks. It gets close to articulating what has become my process, though I think about it as more of a three-pronged approach comprised of the foundational image/forms, (flexible but not so much that it relies on the emergence of spontaneous forms to cohere, i.e. autonomous), color, and a formal or ideological organizing principle other than color—line, composition, technical application of paint, possible emotional relationships, etc. But held loosely enough to resist any sort of preconceived expectations.
For example: tomorrow I'll be going into the studio to begin with a screenshot of a man with his hands bound behind his back from an anti-meth commercial my father directed years ago (foundational image), a work titled Male Nude NM124 (1965 & 1973) by Paul Cadmus (color), and a 1971 intaglio engraving by Dieter Roth titled Little Cloud (organizing principle—line, used in a rhythm as a slowly expanding or contracting grid).
While each new work inevitably diverges to some extent in the making, (again, no preconceived expectations) this structure has allowed me to deepen my connection with specific art historical works, which I have to trust as a path toward hacking away at the tangle covering what I'm circling around.
view24 September 2025
“The problem with ideas is, the idea is often simply a way to focus your interest in making a work...a function of the work is not to express the idea...the idea focuses your attention in a certain way that helps you do the work.” – Jasper Johns
view22 September 2025
Returning to Jasper Johns today. Specifically two ink and water-soluble encaustic on plastic works After Larry Burrows (2014) and Farley Breaks Down (2014) from his 2019 show Recent Paintings & Works on Paper at Matthew Marks Gallery. Many more works in the show are repetitions on this same motif, (it is Johns), but the relationship between these two is illuminating for me. The latter is a satisfyingly literal breakdown-via-liquidity of both the former and its subject, yes, but beyond that they are a case in point for one's subject as a means for getting into a mode of working that is separate from the making of an image. In many ways that says it all, but it's a needed reminder to not fall into habit—turning into a factory is a process that leads to the wrong kind of thoughtlessness in making, where the end product/idea overpowers the pure, radiant initial impulse of engaging with something that represents a potential door to an expansion of one's experience of reality.
view20 September 2025
Springboarding off of my last post, I made a new, currently untitled work that feels like the first true synthesis of a considered approach from every angle of my practice—went back to my archive of images from my time with Joey and, while they are difficult to revisit, they are asking for processing via painting with an earnestness that I haven't felt in a long time. One from a spotlit video shoot we did formed the basis of the main figure in the work, and the architecture that formed around it finally feels like it is acting naturally as an elucidating foil and an inevitable consequence.