Faucet Repair

17 June 2026

Support (working title): some Courbet colors—Self-Portrait with a Black Dog (1842-44)—isolated and repurposed for this painting based on a lounger and a leaf that I saw outside a window with Yena in Lido. I remember the pillowy cushion bending to the empty weight of dried foliage.

I think the main organizing factory/inquiry with this one was trying to achieve a simultaneity of receding and confronting (in feeling and space), but I also ended up with something of an echo or a mirror. And a lesson in line. Worth noting to self that, as exemplified in the process for this one, I’m noticing how much more I seem to be working things out ahead of time in the drawing phase now. Of course there’s a certain (large) portion that needs to remain unknown before I begin painting to make it worth doing, but I’m also realizing more and more that I still feel fulfilled when the surprises happen earlier in my sketchbook. I suppose the most satisfying is when they happen in both phases.

Anyway, I think this one is asking some worthwhile questions and gave a good shot at fragmenting them further, but I think the color is a bit too binary still. So I think the next problem to solve has something to do with combining this more dynamic approach to line with a more interesting/nuanced/subtle approach to color so that they’re complementing each other rather than merely coexisting and the whole thing can reach a harmony that extends beyond the kinetic further into silence.

15 June 2026

Image inventory: a jagged wet reflection of a plane on a tarmac, collapsed and dismembered mannequins in an abandoned shop front window display, a group of pigeons on a sidewalk (half in light, half in shade), a marshmallow-looking lounge chair, two white doors loosely bolted together (one with covered-up graffiti in a block of gray), a phone booth with etched graffiti, a dog blurred and lunging towards a hand, dried yellow mimosa flowers on a nightstand (small dead explosion), a sliver of blue sky between two terracotta buildings with laundry lines, a white rectangle building floating on top of a full frame of ocean water, a dark cloud that looks like a face in profile over a small fluffy luminous cloud, a reflection of train seats, a small concrete sphere balancing on a brick ledge, two boats speeding through a canal towards a horizon, contrails shooting upwards out of two cut tree branches, a small red home and a small white bridge from above, rain drops in black water, wood grain three ways, pastel colored ceramic bowls at varying heights on a wood floor with dappled light, ivies encroaching on an upturned table, a yellow lost cat sign (name: Falco), shells organized by color (mostly whites and gray-blues) on a beach.

13 June 2026

Read Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953) based on his Bauhaus lectures for the first time today before getting to work and felt reinvigorated by it. Evergreen. Over time I’m planning to sit with each of its subdivisions (below, as organized by Sibyl Moholy-Nagy) in depth…

I: Line as point progression Line as planar definition Line as mathematical proportion Line as coordinator for the path of motion

II: Line as optical guide Line as optical reason Line as psychological balance

III: Line as energy projection

IV: Line as symbol of centrifugal and centripedal movement Line as symbol of will and infinity Line as symbol of color mutations and kinetic harmony

…but for today I’m noting the first principles he lays out because they’re helping me think through the spatial inquiry that’s starting to happen in my studio (the Delimitation Stacks). With the caveat that I’m trying to submerge these things after learning them as I make—their relationship to intuition feels very important to preserve.

Anyway, to begin with, I think the categorization of active, medial, and passive lines (with respect to their cause, impact, and effect) relates to what I’ve arrived at recently in thinking about the goal of an optical essence of a space as a stack (vertical for now) of independent elements, which can then be individually (and endlessly, though not aimlessly) augmented to arrive at new structures. Which, when done well, seem to point towards inner relationships. Which Klee traces to nature—how we can think of line as it relates to the rhythms, patterns, and forms of human anatomy, plans, and earth, water, and air.

And so I think what’s crucial to implementing his teachings is to internalize them to the point where I can take an “active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal,” yet still honor certain instincts of the eye as they relate to emotional honesty. The toggling of delimiters through active, medial, and passive lines can be a playful, exploratory exercise. Even the simple notion of finding a space between an active and passive plane feels like it could be generative for an entire painting—an active/passive gradient—or a single choice to move something stagnant into a more dynamic range.

11 June 2026

From last night's crit at the courthouse: foregrounded plane(s) sliding off of the background (up or down), kinetic overlay, the subject deadened then revisited then layered on top of the potent original (failed) state. Sharon brought up Calder, which seems like such a logical reference now but I admittedly need to spend more time with the work (and I will). She also made a nice point about the potential value of mixing richness built up over time with the immediacy and intentionality I'm drawn to. Which in the case of Sink relates to background and foreground, but can really be applied to any constituent element. Good fuel for moving forward.

9 June 2026

Stand (working title): something of a flattened and raised still life of the yellow mimosa flowers Yena got me a couple months ago in a vase on my nightstand. Been wanting to paint them for a while because I enjoy how they look like a small controlled explosion, but I couldn’t figure out the approach until today. Arrived at the simple idea of a volatile form rendered in a subdued palette—finding that negation of a defining characteristic often opens up possibilities, even if that negation is happening behind the scenes (perhaps especially). I suppose I must have been thinking of those Santa Maria Zobenigo marble reliefs I mentioned a couple days ago. As well as the Polaroid I took of the campfire Yena and I made in Winchester in the summer of 2024. And Duchamp's literally seminal Paysage Fautif (Wayward or Faulty Landscape) (1946) painting that I’ve had on my studio floor this week—came back from New York with one of the publications from the MoMA show. This all has to do with the surface as well, trying to find some way to divert attention from it by muting and smooshing it as much as possible while still retaining an active sense of motion and depth and change through it.

7 June 2026

Delimitation Stack

5 June 2026

Stems (working title): a painting that began today based on a wrought iron grille I saw in Venice covering a second story window with a rectangular pot full of tulips reaching towards the sun on its sill. The rails that comprised the grille were pocked with lumpy (but still pretty delicate) pale orange ornamental flowers along with some clover-looking loops, hollow yellow flower shapes, and four yellow x shapes. From far away, the black iron rails were nearly camouflaged by a black shade that was drawn behind the tulips, which made the ornamental pieces appear to float in space. I love that idea, something old and robust guarding new life while fading away. Thought of Eric Timothy Carlson’s latex on canvas Mandala painting (can't find a date for it), which is a piece I've had saved and often come back to for its ability to conjure a similar sensation. And just after I saw the grille, I encountered two fragments of a lost painting by Bellini (presumed to be a transfiguration painting; the placard read Testa di Cristo e Cartiglio, circa 1500-1502) in the Gallerie dell'Accademia. The “Cartiglio” fragment felt like a complete painting on its own to me, and it must have made its way in—I see its little scab of red paint raised above the flatness of the rest of the piece in the button-like flowers I painted today. Also must have been remembering the central stem, the way it divides yet arises from the landscape (the logic of the work as a whole seems to shift as the eye traces it from top to foreground). Not to mention the little opening in the top left, which I assume was a bit of the Christ figure’s robes but read like a slice of sky to me.

3 June 2026

Getting back into the studio (and typing up the notes that accumulated along the way) after traveling for a week. Went to Venice for four nights in that time, saw the Biennale and the treasures at The Gallerie dell'Accademia, which I'll get into in upcoming posts. But I must first mention the marble relief maps on the Baroque facade of the Santa Maria Zobenigo, a 9th century (rebuilt in the 17th century by the architect Giuseppe Sardi) church directly across the street from the hotel I stayed in for my last night in the city.

The maps depict areas where the Venetian general Antonio Barbaro served (he funded the church's reconstruction). In contrast with so much of the Renaissance work I was seeing, they immediately stood out to me for their somewhat abstract treatment of representation and their secular content (side note: apparently John Ruskin was not a fan of the choice to adorn the facade with images of Barbaro's military exploits rather than religious symbols—he called it a “manifestation of insolent atheism”).

Anyway, they're really great. There are six of them, one for each of Candia, Zadar, Padua, Rome, Corfu and Split. In the Corfu piece, a cluster of gable-roofed homes almost tumble off of the surface. For Rome, a fortification wall protrudes from the right edge of the piece and appears to unfurl like a ribbon—that 1988 Paul Thek painting Untitled (Banner) came to mind. There actually are banners in the corners of the works that display the cities they depict, now that I think about it. But I spent the most time in front of the Split work, which is primarily comprised of hard-angled topographical lines arching over a wonky polygon to form an altar-like shape. Or a mandala melting from the bottom. It just reads as something both totemic and strange, which is a quality I'm am always drawn to. Lovely example of art arising from the space between a faithful eye and the limits of the hand/medium.

1 June 2026

Sink: the second story bathroom at my house features a casement window that opens over a tree-lined street for fresh air. Above it the ceiling paint is peeling into inverted sailboats. There are some little tiles glazed in pastel shades crawling across the walls in single file. Mirrors around the room throw planes to each other, and when the sun sets, their west-facing edges burn thin orange.

Perhaps this painting is an attempt to poke holes in a perspective hardened by daily routine so that it leaks some optical essence—a dynamic mesh. Angles blooming from one another to form a sort of generative stack. A delimitation sta