Apr, 16, 2025
March, 31, 2025
March, 13, 2025
This is the work currently directing my departure from overthrowing the texture of the foam with plaster or mortar, rather embracing the rigid, soft fragility of this interpretation of a stadium.
March, 05, 2025
Today is when I start working on the piece that will take me away from the disdain I had in my prior entry, the one where there was too much fucking material on this scene of traffic.
I have these perfect pieces of foam that are becoming a full stadium. Complete with a wrap around configuration of overpasses. Those enchanting and invasive structures are always right next to a stadium.
I begin with the top, a wild excavation of a pattern that feels like scaffolding to me begins via hot wand (literally a skinny wand that gets very hot and allows me to precise-ly“ish” cut into the foam to make the pattern).
When I realized how imprecise it became, melting vulnerable pockets of the foam, I would actively try to maintain the precision as I went deeper into the block. Then, witnessing light behind it emerge, more and more and more start to solidify my thoughts of the sculpture being treated like a painting. It is doing, for instance, what a Alex Ross Hutton painting does for my eyes and understanding what the visual noise of dense rollercoaster scaffolding loods like (my current painter obsession).
I can make the sense of scaffolding, by the crisp renderings on the surface. The ones deeper in can be a little less clear and add to the noise.
Feb, 27, 2025
I am coming to the conclusion there is too much fucking material on my work. I want to expose the foam. I want to build and utilize frames to maintain the integrity of the sculptures that way. The work will be handled by that frame, rather than the foam sculpture itself, as they get even more fragile ands brittle after being bent, melted, and adhered together, of course.
I mean, just look at this shit. Coagulated. And not purposefully. And things can be done unpurposefully, but the results are merely saying to me, never do this again in this way!
A unifying layer of plaster is on its way to help stop the excessive noise. At this point, this is a slow experimentation. And I can’t quit!
Jan, 21, 2025
Today my notebook is rock solid from the temperature.
I am listening to something that
is taking me towards thoughts of all I cannot change, of all the ways we perceive our own struggles, of all the roles we play as the main character of our own lives. I think of the egocentric-ness of the now president and what that main character syndrome must be like. There is an overwhelming weight of the unknown around me. It is impactful.
The impact energizes me
to learn and dissect…everything.
Today, I am
using what I have, not craving any new material. I found this stuff a while ago, “cellular clay.” A brick of white powdery substance that my girlfriend describes as coming from Mexico, really comes from the Seattle Recreative — a store that sells scraps to artists (it is my favorite store, and that was not my favorite joke from her). It is basically papier-mâché, and acts as strong as clay and can be sanded after it dries. I am using it to stabilize a part of my work that has been revealing itself as quite fragile (and made a few skeptical in recent studio visits).
I made the gooey, pulpy
substance in the sink at home after making breakfast for my girlfriend’s six year old, playing rather patiently with the array of motor vehicles on the counter top — there was even a helicopter — while I read her messages to me about the strip of traffic she has been waiting in for twenty minutes.
WTF, she types.
Later, writing this, listening
to that recording making me think of all the things I cannot change, the thoughts move toward the privilege of having evidence, and being able to see from all vantage points. I straddle, careen, rotate, and create semi-circles in the dust of styrofoam on the floor of my studio to see every bit of this piece of fucking styrofoam I turned into my girlfriend’s current personal hell; the place where my anxiety stirs up and also often sorts out. I am in traffic.
Jan, 06, 2024
Today is Jan, 06, 2025, and I am looking at the images from exactly a year ago today.
Taking apart sculptures that failed in their original conceptions and lathering layers upon layers of material to reconcile their weakness, I guess that is what I have been up to for the past year. Face first falling into the cycle I created, I read a journal entry from two days later in 2024. I lamented the unrest felt leaving the things, I intended to do, undone. There still remained a sense of momentum. At the top of the new year…of course there is! I am grateful for its return like I am my departure from this space pictured below.
