Faucet Repair

14 July 2025

On the heels of talking to Danny and the resulting R.B. Kitaj references, I'm thinking about compositional fracturing, of the regeneration of motifs through optical strategies. Wish I had given Danny a little more space to unspool that thread through the lens of his current subject matter, and I suppose that's partly why I'm noting it here. In any case, for me much of his work's dynamism comes from the patience with which he coaxes light, color, and form into an equilibrium that generates meaning through becoming, and the way he is beginning to repeat motifs in that process is allowing for the structure of the motifs themselves to become malleable. That's exciting. I find that in Kitaj too, in the way his figures often seem to sprout from or imply an underlying geometry.

12 July 2025

Found a small invoice book at the post office that came with two pieces of blue carbon paper to use for copies on the blank pages that follow each invoice page. A welcome coincidence—as I think more about the relationship between drawing and painting, printing has now squeezed its way in as well. Comes at a time when I've been spending a lot of time looking at Degas's black and white monotypes, which are masterclasses in working with/thinking about volume. Line and mark-making are obviously important in them as well, but to my eye those elements serve to accent, clarify, and cohere dense maps of space born through volume by value. They also bring attention to the edges of forms in a way that I have maybe subconsciously approached but haven't addressed directly yet, which is exciting. There's a vibration, a restlessness that partners so harmoniously with the aforementioned density. A honed way of looking in both absolutes and specifics.

10 July 2025

Nice piece on Joachim Patinir's The Penitence of St Jerome (1515) by Dylan Vandenhoeck, been holding what he says about how that work “embodies a situated, shifting engagement with the world” in its approach. Has made me sit longer with the idea of the confluence of observable space and inner space (with regard to the optical). I think where I can meet him is my relationship with memory, which seems like it is becoming more important to me than the observed present. Recall filtered into illusionistic space feels related to how he describes the painting as “a landscape of interiority made exterior. The rocks, the trees, the streams, and paths become the spatial correlate of Jerome’s self—his perception, his struggle, his consciousness.” I like the idea that the logic of a painting could be both independent from and intrinsically linked to the maker, and what might arise from an awareness of those two forces in dialogue.

8 July 2025

Off the back of making Link and spending more time with Samuel Hindolo's work, I'm becoming excited by the possibilities of thinness and drawing right now, what the interplay between pencil and brush can produce and suggest, especially on a surface like panel. A disappearing structure, a complicated relationship between resolution and dissolution. To encounter something fragile and weather-worn feels relevant right now, like it can be a conduit for an encounter with a more real sense of the breakdown hidden behind the solidity we think we see.

6 July 2025

Energized by discovering Samuel Hindolo. Closest thing to visual poems I've encountered in a while. There's overlap and accumulation in much of the work, a tactility that implies slowness and lived-in inquiry. But there's also an delicate softness to his touch and handling of tones that suggests these buildups become carefully considered scaffolding for developing ideas, or that they aren't necessary groundwork for attempts. In this way narrative is implied but fractured, symbols prioritized for both content and form depending on the context. Keep thinking about thirty pieces of silver from his 2023 show at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin—at least the reproduction of it I have saved. What it's doing with the horizon bringing the impending to the present feels charged and of now, but without a heavy whistleblowing hand. A vestige of something potent and undead.

4 July 2025

Ring

In offset air lower than sky lower than blue we dressed up

an earlier land tomorrow the failing eye reverses

2 July 2025

Mattress

Up lifted edge hog brain across a new floor wet and level

30 June 2025

A song came together this weekend and so did its cover art: a pink dinosaur in a motion-blurred field of green and blue caught between destruction and desperation, its arms reaching toward a shape broken in half. Yena said the song flows like a river, and I think attaching this image to it is related to what I have been feeling from that CAConrad piece I mentioned in my last post here. A simultaneous lament and battle cry emerging from a current. Which could also describe the text I read in the second half of the song: an excerpt from an interview with a Chicago janitor named Eric Hoellen that appears in Working (1974) by Studs Terkel:

I make a pretty good buck. I figure if I do my work and do it honestly I should be entitled to whatever I make. For high-rise buildings, head man makes a thousand dollars a month and his apartment. You never heard of that stuff before. I've turned down high rises by the dozens. I can make more money on the side on walkup buildings.

Most tenants, I get along with 'em. The bad part about a tenant, they have no respect for your hours. Maybe my day starts when their day starts, but they want something done when they come home. My day is ending too. They'll call up and some will be sarcastic about it. “You have to come here when I'm home.” That's not true. They can leave me the key, so I can do it on my own time. Some people don't trust you. If I'm gonna steal something, I'm not gonna steal from somebody I know, especially when they know I'm in there. If they can't trust me, I don't want to be around 'em.

They come home maybe around seven and you're sitting down to supper and they'll call. “I got a stopped up toilet. It was stopped up yesterday.” I'll say, “Why didn't you call me? I could have had it fixed today while you were at work.” “Well, I didn't have my key.” Sometimes you get in a mood and you say, “Suffer then.” (Laughs.) If I'm eating, I finish eating, then I go. But if it's a broken pipe and it's running into somebody else's apartment, you get on your high horse and you're over there right away.

Phone calls always go to your wife, and a lot of people are very rude. They figure your wife works. My wife is not on the payroll. They call her up and chew her out about something, “When will he get here?” She's just there, and she's being nice enough to take my calls for me. A lot of the janitors now are getting machines to take their calls. They'll call you up and the machine says, “Leave your message.” They'll say something silly and hang up. They'll see you on the street and tell you about it. They don't like an answering service. They want to make contact right there.

My wife gets tired of the calls. It's a pain in the neck. My mother lives with us since my dad passed away. She takes my calls for me. She's used to it. She's been doing it so long. She lets 'em talk if they have a complaint. She just lets 'em talk. (Laughs.) Some of 'em will demand. I just tell 'em, “I think you're very unreasonable. I'll see you in the morning.” If they keep arguing, I just politely say, “That's it.” And I hang up on 'em.

You just don't let it get the best of you. We've had janitors hang themselves. Since I've been out here, three hung themselves. They let it get the best of 'em. I asked this one guy, “Eddie, what on earth is wrong?”

He's up there fixing lights in this high rise and he's shaking all over. “These people are driving me crazy,” he says. I read about this guy, Red, he blowed his brains out. People drive 'em batty. They want this, they want that. You let it build up inside—the heck with it. you do the best you can. If they don't like it...

You gotta watch. We have a business agent in the area and, oh man, there's too many guys lookin' for work. These people coming from Europe, Yugoslavs and Croatians. We're talking about young guys, thirty years old, twenty-five. They're nice guys. They talk broken, but you get to know 'em. They bowl with us and learn as quick as they can. A lot less young native-born are in it now. They'll take a job like a helper until they can find something better. A helper makes $640 a month, five-day week.

Back in the forties a janitor was a sort of low-class job. Nobody wanted it. But during the Depression, janitors were working. They had a place to live and they had food on the table. It was steady work. They had a few clothes on their back. Other people didn't.

28 June 2025

Holding this one particular CAConrad poem from Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return. All of the works in that collection are untitled, and the form of each one is inextricably linked to its essence, so I can't really reproduce it here faithfully. But it's the one that begins: “what would it take to / kill the imagination”—those first two lines form the top of a characteristically sculptural word shape that descends into a point marked by the word “vigor,” the whole thing balancing on the bottom two lines: “we were going to be okay / we just did not know it at the time.”

Anyway, it's the opposite of motion sickness. Motion ecstasy. That sort of feeling animates the journey from top to bottom, and I get the embodied sense of passing through a threshold, a simultaneous awareness of vitality and decay. Near its middle there's a sort of axis at: “blood I / love you / your force / the force / of blood,” a solid inflection or reflection point in the tumbling flow forward. Something about preservation and choice in relation to the inevitable and fully felt.

26 June 2025

Living room: fleshy, pure, elemental—I wonder if it even reads as erotic. In my head indebted to Lois Dodd, the window separating the viewer from but also connecting them to looming nature. Also feels related to the relationship between memory and architecture; Christian Hawkey pointed to that idea in Mamma Andersson's work, has remained with me since. Certainly there is a link between the interiority of a room and the tactile interiority created by bodies fusing. Thinking about the curtains too; their function expanded beyond cover to structure, their cloudlike softness supporting the figures. But all of it suspended in the sky with the trees.