view10 June 2025
In hill—mostly about letting the surface collect and store time. That problem of randomness creeps in again when thinking about that kind of mark accumulation, but in this case it was less random movements and more a repeated sequence of failed explorations. The word terraform felt relevant, not as a title like I originally considered, but as an attempt. An attempt to make something inhabitable. There wasn't going to be a figure in there, but the smoke was a breath that lead to a head stacked over the house, which ultimately gave it that unplanned mesh, that kind of rack focus where the fence becomes a spine becomes a fence.
view8 June 2025
“Charchoune is not so much depicting the world as conjecturing it, conjuring it up. Painting is itself a kind of construction work, he seems to say, just as a building is a kind of composition.”
More Merlin James, the week of Merlin James. But that's ringing clear to me, conjecturing and conjuring. That seems core to why this current direction feels so abundant. It's less the recognizable stuff of observed reality and more a kind of digested mix of the everyday optical and a developed privacy into something constructed, yes, but also preexisting. I keep repeating “outside of time” to myself and coming back to illustration-based work from my childhood: Red Ranger Came Calling, Falling Up—that lived-in staying power, a visual language simple enough to put pieces together in a young mind while appealing to the accumulated wisdom of a well-traveled body.
view6 June 2025
It's becoming about new ways to get the snowball rolling down the hill, about finding worthwhile problems to solve—the existence of Oblique Strategies is making more sense. Especially one I drew today: “Question the heroic approach.” In turning to the small with more confidence, subject matter feels much less important as it becomes primarily a vessel for new ways to explore paint, color, planarity, etc. Later period Serge Charchoune. Speaking of planarity, Stand: a synthesis of thoughts around depth captured in flattened space. There's also something there about purity and muddiness, that delicate gouache and pencil core surrounded by thick olive and black in a heavy hand. Still a glow, but less of a brightness/contrast bludgeon and more of an allowing rather than showing.
view4 June 2025
Matador feels like a small breakthrough. Before it came to be, I realized the grid that I scratched into the purple tree idea must have come, (along with Sasnal's pencil scaffolding), from the Daumier work that Merlin James wrote about for Burlington in 2014 that I mentioned a couple days ago: “The grid, visible through the whole design, evokes bars or astragals as it crosses the window, and across the empty canvas behind him, it as it were, depicts itself, suggesting that that surface too carries such a matrix for future composition.”
The tree wasn't working, so I went in over it led by a vague conception of a figure holding a digital camera at an angle to the sky. Memories of Tessa shooting the sun. The grid-like scratches I was painting over had dried, so they created a topography that instantly communicated with the subject matter; the lines crossing through the figure's line of sight compressed the rectangle (“camera”) shape and the face into a space where a difference in depth between them is implied yet confused, and also added an extra element of push and pull as some parts of the lines disappeared with thicker application of paint.
And speaking of application, this one really taught me something about the relationship between brushwork and wetness of the brush, working color in versus sloshing it on top. I'm wary of getting too excited about the particular path that led to a thickened, buzzing look, as I still think careful intention feels almost prerequisite to an uncontrived resolution, but I really do love the textures and time recorded on the surface. Starting to really agree with Eisenman—can't remember where she said it, but I recall her saying something about how important the surface is to the physical experience of the work, to moving with the artist through an image. At this point that feels not just preferable, but essential and generous.
view2 June 2025
Invigorating catching up with Danny for the first time in a few years and talking about music. Gave me the gift of More Water (SBWT). Seemed like there was some parallel between my scaling down, both in subject scope and size, and the way he spoke about approaching his live sets—locking into a groove and letting it run, choosing moments to add color sparingly. I think that's actually exactly how he phrased it, “adding color.” Interesting how his thinking felt similarly time-based to how mine feels right now. Maybe it's a little more obvious with music, but it's true that hitting people over the head with galaxy-brained haymakers over and over is a bad move both in audio and image. Getting the same sentiment from the Padgett/Brainard poetry combination (Pink Dust + I Rememeber) that I've been going to sleep with each night; private everydayness in sequence becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
view31 May 2025
Two paintings materialized today. The first a view of the Honor Oak purple tree through some kind of frame, screen, barrier, grid. Today felt like it was largely about nests, about safety, about home and being seen in the home and seeing the home from afar. Not sure I love one square of the scraped screen lines ducking behind the tree, feels a bit too cheeky, may have to solidify that bit into a glitch pixel blackout.
The second orbits around on a hill: house on a hill, home on a hill, up on a hill. “As the day dissolves.” Pretty delighted by its toy feeling, its playful colors that offset the grandeur of the image; the title should encapsulate that simultaneity. Maybe Terraform.
view29 May 2025
Merlin James. So much to unpack, but for now I'm just noting that his work consistently strikes such a beautiful equilibrium between the personal/specific and the general/anonymous/genre, sits self-aware right in the middle of the paradox, always lightened by humor and weighted by history. It's helping me toward a fresh foundation to get going on this painting informed by the purple tree at Yena and Raina's new flat. Thinking of beginning with a dissolving container, (“Daumier’s famous willingness, even compulsion, to leave pictures unfinished”—James from a 2014 article he wrote for Burlington), but with the tree somehow achieving the centered focus and presence of an Adrian Morris...
view27 May 2025
A Ron Padgett poem reproduced here from his new book Pink Dust, which I picked up recently and have been carrying around with me everywhere. What a gift. I want it to be part of my conversation forever. It appears this poem is untitled, at least in the printed context. I'm going to type it line by line:
I shovel a path
from the porch to the truck
and another around the house
to the back door, stopping
to see if I'm one
of those geezers
who have heart attacks
while shoveling snow,
and when I'm finished
I'm not. Look
at all that snow out there
going down the hill
as far as the eye can see.
view25 May 2025
More Aubrey Levinthal. A couple things in particular. Firstly, I read this on her Instagram from a February 2024 post that accompanies paintings of her partner and child:
“I’m careful to be too personal here usually, privacy feels important, the algorithms certainly don’t like it and I don’t often either. But so much of my work comes from this well of feeling and experience for and with them, and that should never be denied.”
Pretty much exactly how I feel. Despite having my boat rocked into self-doubting waters for a couple years, I'm back to allowing work about the people I care about. It just seems to be a natural thing, and it's nice to hear that echoed by an artist I admire.
Secondly, her words in a press release for an Ingleby Gallery group show she was in last year of artists responding to Bonnard: “And he described seeing from behind his eyes, of capturing the way a first glimpse of a room feels, and the urgency to get that down, the time between seeing it and painting it captured behind his eyelids. It was very freeing and wonderful to read and has stayed in my mind – his work has that authentic distorted response that memory so often has.”
That last bit, the “authentic distorted response,” is what I have been trying to say about what I like so much about Ground, why it feels like a step in a good direction. I never want my choices to feel random, so I think I'm subconsciously wary of that always, but the way representation is handled in that one feels playful and loose without it feeling like a guessing game. Still unforgiving.
view23 May 2025
Jared Buckhiester and Hilton Als on YouTube via David Kordansky Gallery “on the occasion of No heaven, no how, Buckhiester's first solo exhibition with [the] gallery.” Some of the worst recorded audio I've ever encountered, but some ideas have stuck with me nonetheless.
Firstly, I like what Buckhiester said about receiving support/advice from friends to keep working without judgement until the thing you're looking for reveals itself. Second time I've heard that sentiment in the past week. Very challenging to work without judgement when you're trying to keep your work true to an internal compass, thin line between judgement and accountability. But I think what he was saying has more to do with trust in sustained inquiry rather than a sort of blind optimism.
But most interesting to me was how he spoke about surface in his paintings, how he didn't want the surface to interfere with content by reflecting light or becoming too topographic, how he wanted to make sure the work wasn't about the paint itself. Before I had even heard him say that, I did notice (to the extent that I could in digital reproduction) how flat the paintings felt, how they made a point to lay everything bare. Though I am enjoying the materiality of paint in subtle ways more and more, (still feels excessive to cake it on), I respect and can empathize with that approach. It feels honest, generous, and confident. He mentioned Albert York and Albert Pinkham Ryder as touchpoints, which makes sense.