view7 May 2025
Have also been thinking about intentionality with regard to surface—it seems to me that so many paintings I love do feature surfaces prepared quite intentionally, and yet the way the image ultimately interacts with that surface feels unplanned/unforced. Joseph Yaeger comes to mind again in the way that his forms do feel precise. But the thick gessoed surface creates a topography for the rigidity of those forms to loosen and bounce.
As I've been painting through my own resistance to my original academic figurative foundation, I've been thinking about this a lot; about how I need not obsess over controlling the microscopic play of brushwork on top of the coarse gesso strokes over the grain of the panel to hope for some vibration—it will come as a result of conditions put in place.
view5 May 2025
In The Mood For Love (2000)—what sticks most was how effectively it circled around the main implication/possibility/preoccupation, the patience with which it treated a full exploration of the container for the unfulfilled event, the swirl of conclusions in the mind that prevent them from taking place in waking life. It's an interesting premise for a painting, maybe—what could be a payoff in paint that comes from desire resisted to the point of vanishing, almost as if it was never there in the first place? Maybe a cloud in a transparent box up a ladder in a tree.
view3 May 2025
Jake Longstreth at Max Hetzler, quiet but bold stand-offs between California light and shade. A disorienting thing to be standing in London and immediately feel the familiar naked flatness of the light, especially in paintings like Along I-210 and In Los Angeles (3). Thin and thoughtfully handled all around, but still pretty muscular and with just enough gestural abstraction for flora to become detached floating marks up close, each work expanding and contracting again depending on viewing distance.
Tessa and I both lingered on Los Angeles (4) the longest. The only one in the show with a palpable marine layer, its central Eucalyptus tree having a Wanderer above the Sea of Fog moment looking out over an expanse that reminded us of the view from our parents' house in the Palisades. For me its power lies in how effectively it plays with the softening of perception; the entirety of the tree's form is darkened and dulled, its shadow thrown towards the viewer to imply light falling on its opposite side. But the light's source is that misty expanse, somehow luminous despite almost imperceptibly subtle gray-blue gradations forming the horizon through the haze. Lovely bit of painting.
view1 May 2025
A reflection on Bough (8x10 inches, oil on panel, 2025) here.
Feels like the truest channel of my values in a while, which I find are being clarified more and more by music. In the sounds I'm making, I'm drawn to elongated spaciousness, to stretching my own patience and outlasting my expectations by waiting not just until a plucked note is finished, but until any trace of it is gone before approaching the next phrase. Staving off resolution or predictable wholeness. I think some similar thinking is at play in this painting—there's that blue shadowy form entering the image from the left that is wrapping itself around the figures, maybe protecting or attacking. A line from Yena's poem “Summer Time” comes to mind: “And a handwritten letter, / wrapped in plastic, / visits someone.” I'm interested in that anticipation of a force or a presence, the yielding to it or the resisting of it or the barrier to accessing its content. There's also a bit of fullness versus emptiness, how that blue is almost scanning the figures, either stripping them bare or forming their density in the process. As in music, it is becoming clear where to push and pull, how to subtract just enough to keep the frail bones of a statement intact so that it can be delivered within a structure despite its ephemerality.
view29 April 2025
Took a seat at a table in the Pret near Dalston Kingsland station yesterday to decompress after my shift. After only a couple of minutes, a sunburnt woman in a winter coat with tousled hair dragging a heavy suitcase and mumbling to herself about the heat sat down next to me and started talking at me about how to find places with air conditioning in London during the summer. She saw my sketchbook, which was underneath my phone and wallet on the table, and asked what kind of art I made, so I told her, and then she began to scoot closer to me while she lowered her voice into a whisper to tell me that she was a multifaceted designer and that we could make money together if I was interested in collaborating. I respectfully declined, at which point she made a move with her hand at my wallet. I kind of surprised myself at how fast I deflected her hand and quickly packed my things as the strangeness of the situation reached a climax with her throwing her head back to laugh at the exchagne. This kind of scene was apparently not so out of the ordinary for this Pret, because none of the staff budged as I made my way to the bathroom, which is where my instincts took me to escape the situation and collect myself. Took a few deep breaths in a stall and then exited into a communal hand washing area that also doubles as a hall for people waiting to use the stalls. I went to look in a mirror at a sink and a different woman—gaunt wearing a gray hoodie pulled over her head—bent down next to me so her face was level with mine. She said something that sounded like “You could've been quicker,” so I responded with “Sorry?” to which she said “I accept your apology” in a pretty Gollum-y tone. I replied “No, I mean what did you say before that?” and she responded with “I accept your apology” again, this time bringing her face even closer to mine. I peeled away and pushed past her out of the bathroom, out of the Pret, and back into the current of a beautiful Dalston day.
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.