NOTES IN THE SHADOW
Last April, I started a draft titled The Rancho about finding time to play and plan at a park in Burbank’s Rancho district. The park lies at the edge of Griffith Park, separated by the LA River and the 134, which run parallel. At its far end, the park meets the LA Equestrian Center and a row of houses with private stalls across the street. On quiet mornings, riders on horseback pass through. The location viscerally thrilled me. But a day after I started the draft, I had a run-in that caused me to stop going, and I haven’t written since. In one of my last published newsletters, HC-07, I wrote about finding inspiration on weekly drives through the canyons to Malibu—another activity I had to let go of after the fires. The last year or so in Los Angeles has been incredibly disorienting.
I keep returning to Winslow Homer’s Summer Night, a painting I love in its entirety, but the shadowed figures especially.They feel like the key to something essential, but they are obscured just beyond clarity. I find myself across from them, in a state of suspended ambiguity. I thought about these figures a lot while working on Ten Thousand Tons on My Head, a series of landslide studies, and I’m thinking about them again as I work on a new series of studies on paper titled Hard Edge Moon. I think it’s when the edges blur that I find the thrill. Everything feels familiar, but it’s all so unsettling.
