view27 April 2025
Ever since talking to Ross about his song “Wall,” walls of different stripes keep showing up in my paintings. Most recent is one of a figure jumping over or emerging from a big red hill/wall form in the foreground towards an anthropomorphized sky entity (sun? moon?) in the distance that is also reaching back over some blue mountains to maintain contact with the aforementioned red form. The composition almost immediately brought to mind Clarence Holbrook Carter's “Over and Above” series of animals peering over walls at the viewer. What I've painted feels like the inverse of that impulse, like the viewer inhabits the hidden or implied part of the image and the figure is escaping it into the depth of the painting. But also being pulled back at the same time—the unity of opposites, etc.
view25 April 2025
Pleased with recent experiments painting on panel. The wood grain with transparent gesso feels like a tiny revelation. Two elements to react against right off the bat widens the scope of possibility instantly; forward and back, cross-hatching brushstrokes with grain and primed surface, etc. Aubrey Levinthal related. There was also a moment where I had a panel I was painting resting on a nail on the wall, which interrupted a first layer acrylic wash so that a little portal to the raw/primed wood remained behind the head of the nail. That felt exciting too and has me thinking about the possibility of stenciling or subtraction in future constructions. I also like that I don't have to stretch a panel—just prime and go. Think they'll be my new home, at least for a while.
view23 April 2025
Wall came from a conversation I had over the phone with Ross where we spoke about bodies in water in art; how water can fragment, suspend, and frame the figure, and how those effects might reflect the viewer. The painting is layered on top of an older painting of a minimized Los Angeles landscape, which remains partially visible in the final image like some detritus floating through and around the figure—I think that overlap gets at something simultaneously jarring and pacifying. “Wall” is also the title of a song by Ross that is often in my head.
view21 April 2025
Ideas are spawning from / relating to / in dialogue with the small, introspective, private moments of my own daily life again. Joe Brainard has been on my mind as something of a North Star: boldness in simplicity, clarity of vision, the sanctity of the internal monologue.
The size of my work is shrinking as my focus narrows too. Self-contained worlds, but ones that can still be further contained by a wider scaffolding. I think that's partly why I'm gravitating towards this mode of focused play with the blank canvas as the ground. The finality of choices left naked like alien life landing in the desert. I think I'm attracted to the deliberateness of what is put down within the structure of full exposure.
view19 April 2025
Looking at my calendar / sitting on the toilet / taking a shower / thinking about death / thinking about LA / counting to thirty (average length of a month) / counting to thirty-two (my age).
Lovely visit to Jonathan's studio in Hackney yesterday, and that discussion around parameters came up again. Or structure, as Jonathan referred to it. Structure for honing and deepening inquiry. Mine and his have a little bit in common right now, namely the clear-primed canvas foundation with that transparent gesso that leaves a toothy surface. He puts his faith in the thin dry drag and I go for the fluid line that leaves a little splashy wake on its way around, generally speaking. We talked in both cases about confronting material comfort, the hand true to you while looking for new ways to trip.
Also relevant was a discussion around forgiveness in the process. I'm coming more and more to a process that enjoys raw canvas too much to keep the idea of burying it alive as a failsafe. I'm happy with a built-up history to slosh around on top of when the idea is dense enough, but there's something about clarity of intention that I'm drawn to now, even if that intention is almost guaranteed to become obsolete as it departs my brain through my hand.
view17 April 2025
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view15 April 2025
There's an interview BOMB Magazine did with Sedrick Chisom in May of 2024 where he talks about how, for him, “there has to be a site of disaster in the work” when making a painting that steers it away from the directionless world of endless hypothetical outcomes. That has been on my mind a lot this week as I've worked through a couple new ideas. The first came from seeing a solar flare on a walk to the studio—I painted a version of what it lingered as in my memory and it ended up solidifying a bit in paint, its rainbow rings taking on a kind of chainlink feeling. But it was completely lifeless on the canvas, floating there with no apparent context or reason to exist, so I took it off the wall to put aside. But as I did, I noticed that it felt a little like a figure lying supine when it was oriented horizontally instead of vertically. That presented a more interesting mix of instincts to unpack. It's a bit of a contradiction to try to remain open to wherever the painting wants to go while seeking concrete problems to solve, especially because you can't manufacture those problems intentionally. Or, you can, but then something disingenuous could lodge itself in the paint.
Anyway, that painting has enjoyed a fruitfully frustrating journey. But I've had another one going at the same time of a blanket in grass (based on visiting Hampstead Heath with Yena last week) that has not yet revealed a good disaster. The whole thing has appeared in decadent brushstrokes over well-planned early layers and has settled neatly into the confines of the canvas, which is to say it has no angle. I have given it a couple days to sit though, so we'll see how it feels when I go back in tomorrow.
If you're reading this, listen to Walt McClements's new album On a Painted Ocean.
view13 April 2025
I think I'm going to spend a while making paintings of the things I see on the ground while walking around. I'm usually averse to that kind of declaration, but I re-titled the aforementioned Uvula by calling it Bag, and something about that choice clicked. I have a few paintings in this vein on the go right now, and I am enjoying the process of using humble, discarded objects as starting points for paintings that aren't beholden to observation but still maintain a place-specific character—it feels good to let paint expand these objects until their realities are stretched while keeping the title grounded in the real places I notice them in. I'm with Toby in that I don't want my work to simply clarify reality, and this feels like a way to walk that line between looking with care while fragmenting freely.
The ground under my feet also has rich potential in its relationship to the concept of the painting ground, which will be interesting to unpack as I get more acquainted with the language hiding behind this impulse. I also think there's something to the fact that in 2025 everyone on their phones is looking at the ground and yet not looking at it at all.
view11 April 2025
A little reflection on making music with Calvin now that a few days have passed. Have been thinking about how the afternoon we spent in sound felt like such a literal flow; a drift down a river together, taking turns gently suggesting ways to shape the wind. What I so enjoyed about that process was the freedom we both felt to follow intuitive impulses towards contrasts: humble and giant, human error and programmed machine. And if one of our offerings became a rock in the current, we would only get stuck on it for a moment before eventually floating around it. That relaxed neutrality elevated the whole experience—friction lost any negative connotation. Instead it was just a color to observe and move through, or maybe mix with another to see what would happen. When I showed what we made to Yena, she said it reminded her of a recurring dream she used to have as a child where she fell down a black hole.
view9 April 2025
About to start a new painting that arose from my recent trip to see Toby in Brighton just before I boarded the Thameslink from Blackfriars—saw another person's silhouette heading towards mine in the window of the arriving train in strobe-like movements. Felt almost like stop motion, little lines struggling to outline its form as it moved. A similar effect filled the rest of the mirrored surface as the glinting river (윤슬) and the buildings on the horizon (they reminded me of an ECG graph) all glitched and strayed from their optical anchors until the train squeaked to a stop. Maybe a painting that circles a similar sensation.