Infinite Eyelids
The Lone Star Flag
The Marsupials, Smith Rock
Wedding Cake (2)
Fuck your feelings (erasewipeoutdisengagesuppressburydestroy)
Zoey, commission
Day 445, week 64
Quiver, oil on canvas
Expanse
Woman with Chairs
Lethal Love. Coloring book pages, black lava medium, gold flake medium, dryer sheets, acrylic, and oil on canvas. "Never trust people who don't have something in their lives that they love beyond all reason."
My dad used to draw coloring books for me when he couldn't afford to buy them. For those of us who used to color aimlessly, as children of immigrants, wasn’t it a privilege?
In Fredrik Backman's Beartown, seeking justice for an irreparable tragedy is met with resistance for the sake of protecting the trajectory of a town—and a boy—poised for greatness.
What else will be done—no, what else will we do, how far will we go in the name of love (for country, for god, for blood, for power, for life)?
Spiral. Oil on canvas, dryer sheets, glitter.
Acrylic, oil, glitter craft paint, metallic marker, glass.
The Coloring Book:
My Large Glass is shattered on the floor. When I copy the brushstroke free-hand, it gets less and less accurate. I don’t break the illusion of duplication as intent. I let it morph, but only just so. The process is “painstaking,” just like he wanted. It’s deadpan Lichtenstein but also splattered with glitter. A re-personalization of a depersonalized work, continuing the cycle of reclamation (of things which reigned, were dismantled, and called upon again, always at somebody’s expense).
I color it flat on the floor. It’s calming like a coloring book, an exhale, inspiring that Pollock interpretation of Surrealist inhibition-breaking. In the hyper-pressurized zone where the deliberate seeks to cede to the automatic (where we aim to uncover the unconscious and speak the universal), the impulses of AbEx are shown in the process of wavering. The Institution, over a century after the Modern arose, continues to survive. Even Pop was subsumed.
There’s broken glass everywhere. In the doorway. On the rug. On the canvas like an nonsensical mosaic. Paint can be as graphic as it is material. What’s “genius (him, my ability to copy him)” is layered with the banal, what’s art is pierced with the everyday. Despite him, the brushstroke lives on exalted, fetishized, instrumentalized.
Girl in Turquoise
(Read some thoughts on this here.)
Commission for David Acevedo's Eyehear: Heard Mentality
Yarn Universe
(Read some thoughts on this here.)
The figure is repetitive, fast losing the fascination I wish I had the ability to imbue in it. What is it (am I) missing? I am painting a person, but I find myself painting brushstrokes instead. I have less and less of a desire to separate whole and parts, background and figure, to assert form over and against the canvas. Instead, the canvas permeates through like backlight. It is painted then drawn. Layers for texture not form.
There is a feeling that I am not through with the figure, but it isn’t giving me the thing that I want. I am touching those borders (between abstract and figure) which have been imposed, overhauled, obliterated, negotiated, misconceived, but at what point? Some lines are not made but left behind.
Wedding Cake (After Fool's House)
Oil, string, packaging tape, wax
I remember when I first saw a flag (not in passing, not while regurgitating the Pledge of Allegiance), and not just any flag, but a Johns flag.
Always stubborn to tedious layering, probably from formal affinity to the stroke, I wanted to heighten the pictorial qualities of the canvas through its interaction with the background and image. This kind of transparency both forms illusion and flattens the picture plane, confusing form and depth. There's no need for shadow; this is no real space. A certain kind of refreshing breathability. A string can function as anything—steam, background—yet still maintain its identity. A piece of tape is glued on using paint, altering the function of materials both in real and illusionistic space.
The whole object can be substituted by any of its parts, whether alone or repeated, since the image of the signified (wedding cake) adheres to tenuous, and even debatable, guidelines (cylindrical, tiered).
Study of a Left Foot
Graphic
I remember how it looked. The whiteness, the way my skin opened up.
There was a disjointed sense of time. I remember the experience as a few discrete images over a period of hours. Everything that happened in-between to the actual injured area I didn't see, and will never know as memory.
It feels like there's a progression here, but it's unclear what's covering what or what's flowing up or down in this orientation. It's a period of time, frozen. I don't know how long it is, or how to unfreeze it. I find in it a sense of urgency, since there's no completion with either color. That leads to anxiety about what will happen beyond the frames, and whether it's what I want. In the end, no matter how violent or reassuring it is, only this image in front of me matters.
Before turquoise, there was ultramarine, which I still hold dear in my heart. I think of this as the frame and an alternative. Of course, everything is still flat on the canvas, which is still a regular-shaped canvas, so there's nothing really new. But there's a frame, and there isn't. The edges disappear inside another frame. This allows the shapes to interact beyond their colors. In a way it feels like you can transgress the physical frames without having to acknowledge that they're there, like you usually would if an object were painted continuously over distinct canvases. The tone progressions also establish a movement of going in and out of the picture plane while exploding outside of it. So you can enter and leave without being trapped in an endless loop or sliding right out. I think this is a painting that isn't site-specific or anything but still gives you options on how to experience it.
