I began making art about five years ago. My motivations have always been deeply personal. I started in 2019 after taking a class at Northwestern with Michael Rakowitz, having had no prior knowledge of his work, or any substantive interest in art.

Following that experience, I taught myself an intensely laborious method of ink drawing which involved my childhood toys as subjects. In early 2024, I made a complete shift towards painting and gradually abandoned my old subject matter in concert. The most recent work is completely abstract. My hope is that viewers will judge these works on their own terms and perhaps feel something new, or even learn something about that feeling in the process.

I paint because I enjoy it. When I am not able to enjoy things in my life, I paint to cope with grief and difficulties from my earlier years that still affect me today. My practice also serves as a helpful tool for study, so I can arrive at deeper levels of appreciation for works far greater than my own.

Favorites:

webern german dances (hamburg philharmonic and boulez versions also great interpretations)

sessions sonata #2 (first atonal, #1 and from my diary are incredible, a brilliant individual)

BVW 711 - Leonhardt (exquisite little piece)

Di Lassus- Kyrie

Webern - 1905 quartet (quartetto italiano fantastic, emerson also fantastic)

Sweelinck - Ich ruf' zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ

Nancarrow - study for player piano #42

Haydn #63-64, Takacs

this absolutely precious corot at the ashmolean

some of the best pissarro’s i’ve seen are at ashmolean

a fantastic cezanne at the cortauld gallery

curation at the tate was garbage… but this picasso was fantastic!

Serkin late beethoven, particularly #32 and #30, #30 slow movement in particular. Less keen on Kempff, although his six bagatelles are better than Serkins, and with the late sonatas I feel as though I am missing something in Kempff’s interpretation. The way serkin does #30, throwing beethoven’s counterpoint into high relief - oh my, it makes you feel so dearly for that poor beautiful individual. Such tender, painful articulation, and such a precious clumsiness and profound grief - like little hanno at the end of Buddenbrooks. Eschenbach does a good hammerklavier but the dynamic range is ridiculous. Gould can’t play grieg for his life - the more I come to appreciate Leonhardt, the more I distance myself from Gould and Schiff.

Hungarian quartet’s treatment of the third movement of beethoven #12 is absolutely fantastic (thse swirling textures before the steep descent! quire a funny little movement) as is their grosse fugue. The grosse fugue, like the Missa, is best played straight and absolutely proper, with an acute awareness of how absolutely strange the music is on its own terms. The Missa must similarly be played with certain, (but certainly not authoritative or even remotely heroic!) proper, tasteful clarity in order for those gangly harmonies to spill over by themselves. We are not grieving the loss of a savior; rather, we grieving the loss of our own hopefulness, the belief that we could have been saved in the first place. Squarin’ It Off, Y 2 Grey, ESG Live at Screw House, Flippin 2 the classic (235), Pussy weed and alcohol, Dead End Hustler For Life, and 100% business are more obscure favorites besides the classics: june 27th, wineberry over gold, hurricane duck, old school, late night fuckin yo bitch, all screwed up, and 3 n the mornin.

On a related note, I had the privilege to see Leonkoro quartet (a young group) perform Berg’s lyric suite in person, an absolutely devastating experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujLK28Nlmq4

of course the berg violin concerto, tristan, missa solemnis (klemperer), feldman piano and string quartet is nice though I feel more ambivalent about the second quartet and feldman in general lately - although he quotes webern’s 1905 quartet somewhere in those six hours (I don’t like how Feldman speaks nowadays, those radio conversations between him and cage pretending to philosophize like the greeks are so emberassingly of their time - he hates the Germans and sees himself as a Satie and I frankly disagree, or rather, want to disagree as a matter of pride despite my more reasonable judgements - although, to be honest, Feldman’s darmstadt lectures are pretty awesome, the guy had a lot of personality and was right about Stockhausen and controlled chance music being essentially a dead end). Speaking of the Greeks, is it any real surprise, given what he was doing, that Christian Wolff studied Euripides? I’m sure they saw something in each other. Is berg’s lyric suite also modeled after the 1905 quartet? there are moments where it seems to be… That 1905 quartet is such an exquisite piece. I am always thinking about the americans, Elliott Carter has been on my list for a long time, I have his double concerto for piano and harpsichord on record, I know he was good friends with Nancarrow and one of the few that knew about Nancarrow’s rhythmic developments while he lived in Mexico. Most of my knowledge of the New Music was gathered from Charles Amirkhanian’s interviews of composers on KPFA’s The Morning Concert in the 60s, 70s and 80s which is all available on archive.org. During the pandemic I would listen to those pieces all day and work on my drawings for hours and hours at a time. Charles is a brilliant individual, like the David Byrn of American New Music and I hope to meet him someday if possible, and thank him for the education. Charles Shear, the former music director of KPFA before the 1960s was also brilliant. I got into the American sound poets through the Morning Concert, particularly the work of Larry Wendt, an obscure weirdo chemist from New Mexico, and shortly after that forced myself to start listening to Wagner (Larry actually mentioned the ring cycle in an interview with charles and I was like what the hell is that?) despite not enjoying it very much at first listen. I forced myself through Das Rheingold probably ten times before realizing how brilliant it is, and from there it snowballed, and I became obsessed with Tristan, and through that began studying the twelve-tone composers and what led up to them, some Strauss and Brahms, having known about the americans (Sessions, Carter, Feldman, Cage, Johnston, Thomson, Wuornien, Ashley, the minimalists, etc., along with the computer music pioneers, Subotnik, Charles Dodge from University of Iowa) for some time. Boulez is a weasel. Eliane Radigue is mother. Robert Ashley was my first love. Through him I got into Beethoven, starting with the Istomin-Stern Rose Trios (now some of that stuff is pretty corny, beethoven himself disparaged op1 in a few letters that i’ve read), which slowly and eventually merged into my interest in Wagner, after that Webern, and nowadays more Bach, the romantics, the impressionists to a lesser extent (reading some of Webern’s letters and biography, I feel that we may have been close, in the way that I feel close to Mann, or rather the way that Mann makes you feel close to him). The count d’orgel’s ball is a fantastic little book. David luke is wrong, a walpurgis night’s dream adds to the meaning of Faust in a positive way. I have been interested in the Boroque and Franco-flemish schools lately, and find that above everyone else, Bach, Webern and Beethoven are the geniuses of geniuses, probably greater minds than any of the great painters aside from a few of the Italians. I would love to visit the Segantini Museum in St. Moritz someday.