view18 September 2025
Blot: began from archived 50s American home movie footage of two teenage boys throwing another boy in a lake. A step forward, I think, in allowing space for the subject to unmoor from its source via the materials, because the execution of the scene in loosely-handled watercolor created something much more visually interesting than the original sequence of screenshots. But visually interesting isn't the main priority, so I have been thinking much more about my sources, wondering how and why I have moved away from my own documentation and/or family archives in the first place. Regardless, I think it is time to return to them, because having turned away from them has, in my view, tinged some (not all) of my recent work with a bit of anonymity and self-consciousness, which is off-putting for me. But is an important misstep that had to be taken, because I can sense something real cohering now in the space where the intentionality and delicacy of the thin stains/washes on wood technique I'm developing for my early layers has a chance to meet the excavation instincts that sent me down this path almost five years ago.
view16 September 2025:
True split: Seurat's “L'écho, study for Une Baignade, Asnières” in mind, important that the whole thing coheres and dissolves simultaneously. A child or smaller figure stretching fabric over his head to reveal a rich cherry-red/pink interior, a parent or larger figure looming over him with a hand raised. A drama between the figures that acknowledges something gentle and sinister in equal measure, that conveys their awareness of and dependence on one another to exist.
view14 September 2025
The video for “We Like to Party” (1998) by Vengaboys...something feral and disorienting about the 136 bpm, relentlessly pumping choreography, direct eye contact with the camera, almost Jodorowskyian shots of them posed around different parts of Spain, and the lyrics—especially in the prechorus: “Happiness is just around the corner.”
view12 September 2025
Son shell: Began based on Omeed playing cello at Red Room until the afterimage of Tessa pulling a hermit crab out of clear ocean water in Sag Harbor overlapped it and mixed with contemplation of home, sleep, death, omnipresent technology, rest, and ultimately something that feels maybe aligned with the allegory of the cave in relation to the wisdom accrued from both growing older and remaining steadfast on one's artistic path.
view10 September 2025
Keeping acrylic, pencils, and oil on hand during the image-making process of these new works has created a nimble kind of rhythm in which dead ends with one medium turn into fresh starts with another, but it has also got me thinking about material hierarchies. I'm wary of veering too far into formal experimentation for the sake of it, (I'm reminded again of Judd on Joseph Stella over-prioritizing technical experimentation at the expense of ideas), but I do think there is something about the interplay between these materials when permanence is a factor; wax colored pencils and oil don't mix, so there's a finality to the choices made in colored pencil, a commitment to an irreversible decision that is really helping with my intentionality right now. And also seems like it could be somehow wrapped up in what I'm getting at by holding examples of isolation/solitude in the second half of the 20th century with similar material from the first two decades of the 21st.
view8 September 2025
Another bit from studio conversation today—on specificity. I personally feel like holding my references looser is making my work ring truer, but Edith's point that one should be careful to not lose specificity when allowing fragmentation to happen is a good one. I think honing in on specific source material that holds a uniquely singular presence is vital to the work—but for me personally I think I have begun to cultivate an absolute trust that my instinctive choices, even during research, are doing some of that filtering toward specificity for me. Even grabbing screenshots from the home movies I mentioned in my last post—the act of doing so was impulsive, unthinking, acted on from a hazy peripheral spark, which feels important to trust.
view6 September 2025
Edith asked me in the studio today where my source material has been coming from for this new body of work—I told her about the pre-2000s home videos I've been finding. From 16mm in the 50s to handheld camcorders in the 80s and 90s, I've been focusing on isolated figures engaged, absorbed, occupied in flow. Vermeer. Being drawn to these kinds of scenes and poses isn't new for me, but I've been thinking about the significance in finding them via home videos; with someone behind the camera, there's a communal or social element baked in to the act of capturing someone in their solitude. This feels like a stark contrast with how we have turned the camera on ourselves as the past two decades have unfolded since the first iPhone was released, which in turn has changed our understanding of isolation. Using work as a mirror to reflect this inversion back to viewers to me feels useful and interesting.
view4 September 2025
Susan Rothenberg: The Weather at Hauser & Wirth New York. My first time encountering her work in the flesh—these are such slow release paintings. Was especially taken by Dos Equis (acrylic and tempera on canvas, 169.9 x 296.2 x 4.1 cm, 1974), a big white one of two horses overlapping, the whole composition sliced by lines intersecting twice near the canvas's horizontal midline, once near the top middle edge, and once near the bottom middle edge. The effect is kaleidoscopic, almost as if you are watching the forms alternate between embossing and debossing themselves, the mere presence of the intersecting lines recontextualizing/refreshing/re-presenting the angles of the horses as elemental pivot points. There is also the barely perceptible ghost of what perhaps could have been a first go at placing one of the left x's lines hiding underneath the final layer of white, as if innumerable axes form the architecture of the painting and she has chosen to cover all but those that remain. So much done with seemingly so little.
view2 September 2025
Image inventory: view of a stained glass altar through a church door on Nantucket, a birdlike shadow falling over a slatted bench, long blue laundry center in Flushing, tug of war with a dog, tiny black voids, orange spray paint on steel coverings, rusted apartment railings, fire escapes into the sky, shadows on and crevices in Manhattan pavement, bright white/chrome/yellow (New York subway), sky striking the horizon light a lightning bolt between buildings, sunlight wrapping around the corner of a Manhattan skyscraper, orange vent with steam, cello and violin screeching into a dark bar filled with people who didn't come to listen, end of a three-pronged Long Island City railing spray painted orange/blue/turquoise/yellow/pink and red.
view31 August 2025
Great little essay on the use of language in contemporary painting by Jonathan (Tignor) from the latest entry to his Malerblöd Substack (worth a subscription if you're reading this). Especially the bit where he explains: “Language is hardly stable, but against the backdrop of an abstract painting, there is an illusion of stability.”
He addresses Daisy Parris's painting Portrait of a Poem, pointing out how “the third poetic panel is the most successful to [him] because it operates like the Basquiat above [Untitled (Tar Tar Tar, Lead Lead Lead), 1981]. “Haven’t / Wrote” is barely legible through the blast of paint. It is says more by saying less.”
That immediately made me think of Jasper Johns's Flag (1954-55), which I just saw for the first time at MoMA in New York. It's nearly impossible to find an image online that is high-quality enough to decipher the tiny sentences contained in the bits of its newspaper articles caked in encaustic, but up close in person there were many great little moments that I could imagine must have been quite satisfying for him to recontextualize. Remembering a small section in particular of one of the flag's stripes where most of the newsprint is covered, but the end of a sentence about someone “going into shock” is legible. That to me felt like a nice example of language being used to expand rather than prescribe.