Notes

Why Painting

everything matters because
everything hurts someone
somewhere as it is mattering
we became all we carried into the mast
migratory patterns given to the love again
a way to end this secrecy of suffering 
cut a door in the wolf
so we can retrieve our dead
for a world that matters 

CAConrad, Camisado

  • alchemist noun
    al·che·mist |  ˈal-kə-mist
    Alchemist: Someone Who Transforms Things for the Better
    The long route to English for alchemist began with the Greek word chēmeia, which probably came from the word chyma (“fluid”), derived from the verb chein, meaning “to pour.” It then passed to Arabic, which added its definite article al- (“the”) to the Greek root. The word then passed from Latin to French before coming to English. Some other words derived from Arabic also retain the al- in English, such as algebra, algorithm, and alcohol; in fact, the transformative liquid that was constantly being sought through experimentation by alchemists is another word with the Arabic al- prefix elixir.

  • Utilizing expendable materials to create works of formal pristine beauty

  • Aesthetics and the mystical are shown not said

  • The object will speak and reply if it’s true. If it is true it will resonate with us and is therefore beautiful

  • The simplest forms come to represent the most complex realities

  • Textural and visually tactile work stresses biology, physicality, and vulnerability but vulnerability is now circumvented empathy is a super-power

    • Poison turned into Medicine

MATERIALS WANTED ALWAYS + Guards of civilization.

  1. Right now I am looking at: 

  2. The hopeful Rothko - just when he made the breakthrough, before it all became dark

  3. Joyce Pensato

  4. Stanley Whitney (why are his paintings so good ? it makes no sense but they are Fra Angelico good)

  5. Peter Bradley like always

  6. Diane Arbus

  7. And also a return to Dürer´s Feldhase

21 studio notes; June 2026

1. Materiality is primary
2. The tactile is trustworthy
3. Outcome matters
4. Intuition + rigor
5. If you know if your work begins before language, you’re not working
6. Not imposing, only emerging
7. Time as active material
8. Traces of its own making — memento mori
9. Illustration of ideas is for books
10. Material investigation is inseparable from personhood
11. I have never met a confident person that was also interesting
12. Delicacy and brutality
13. Process-based ≠ accidental
14. Repeated actions rather than singular gestures
15. Surface-recorded history
16. Suspended between making and becoming — like you
17. If you prefer the Panopticon over the tyrant, you will not get my work
18. By the way, you didn’t get Foucault either
19. Formal decisions are important
20. Style is never meaningless
21. Even a monochrome is always a self-portrait