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Placeholder for future discussion of Howardena Pindell, Agent Orange, green juices at Gary Null's and car accidents. A Pindell I haven't forgotten, Songlines: Labyrinth (Versailles), from a 2018 show at Matthew Marks, Painting Now and Forever...

Reruns

After a little while, having turned in my thesis, writing feels good again, though it coincides with a wave of asphyxiation and despair surrounding my paintings and visual projects, very normal, and certainly helped by keeping the taxi light of language turned on. I am nonetheless as terrified as ever that it is the language light that people like me for, and that I will forever be catching up within the paintings themselves.

That said, my work is always and necessarily about potentials. In spiritual practice, potentials are both imperative (choose your own adventure) and misleading—once I trust and allow these to flower (knowing it is a choice, to allow), they often lead me skipping down the primrose path (borrowing from Mearsheimer on Ukraine...how cursed), to miss who people really are, seeing so very much who they could be, their full expanse. It is nice then, with people, to operate more from non-intervention. In art, though, at least the kind I do, you intervene, make things happen, produce. In that sense, potentials are ideal, they keep things rolling. Within the fixity of production, they enable the kind of perma-protean state I love. 

My truly favorite thing—a lot of people's favorite thing—is to move letters and lines and ideas around or across an open surface: a canvas, a digital page, in the realm of conversation, energetic propinquity, whatever. That is where I am at my best, most integrated. The serene agape of whittling a work down to a totalizing (totemic?) nub. Giacometti's ravenous thumbs, sculpting without end. 

So unsurprisingly I become agitated when, for reasons often celestial and providential, that surface grows musty or closed in, when a tenet of total freedom does not seem possible, or overwhelms while failing to lobotomize—as the way one ought to feel, for instance, during sex. Being in pursuit of that strain of half-liberated, half-lobotomized joy, downloaded from the skies in thanks, the lows are low and the highs high. Why not solve for the polarities within. Not that I even have a Big Joan and a little joan, per say. Too twentieth century! Today's splits are not spatial, but simultaneous. Repeating myself, on the same old tip, one walks about in equanimity, seemingly so neutral, with an inner life all the more congested. My Zoomer problem, and ours. How's that for vintage.

By spring—painting the outer in stripes starker and more vivid.

Rainbows

Rainbows are these days very important. It started about two weeks ago. Don’t yet ask me why, an early conjecture would be that some beyond are perhaps using them to communicate with us. Then there are the old symbolic meanings. What comes after the storm. An arc of hope with a fat hazy middle. Contours faint, usually we only get a glimmer. But now, a whole story. Of peaceability possible again, albeit somewhat at a distance. Auguring light. Leaving all shades of news aside, thinking instead of D. H. Lawrence, his first big novel, from 1915: unconceivable changes weathered, so much technological thrumping and still, the single human heart grows wild and through its reaches, generations go on…