I wake up, let my dog out, and we stand barefoot on the bricks, looking up at the stars. In unison, we walk toward the coffee maker. She watches me drink half a cup w…

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Cosmic Sliver

In the evenings, my nine-year-old and I have been watching a new dinosaur documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman. Aside from Freeman having the best narration voice, this documentary has been enthralling us with its timelines. We find ourselves gasping as the we jump backwards and forwards (1,000,000 to 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 years) between…

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After a hard cut back, my roses are exploding with a kind of voraciousness for life right now. The night-blooming jasmine as well. It’s almost overwhelming; I find myself huffing the garden air, trying to get it all inside me.

In my studio, I have a page from Sheli Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries tacked to the wall as a list of reminders for myself. It reads:

“Not spending money adds energy to your art. Not the movie-makers, not the fashion designers, not the chefs. Not thinking about advancing in the world, but rather in your consciousness and your work. Not to be a waste of life. Not to be impatient with myself, with my insides…”

I love these instructions and scan over them often. My garden and this printed out page are nice reminders of what to cut out for best results.

Today I put the final touches on the last painting for my show at Night Gallery. I’m gathering an internal consensus about what I’ve made during this time: excitement is building and the stress of the deadline is falling away. There’s always a kind of suspension between the moment a show ships and its reception: relief, exhaustion, gratitude, and a slow clarification.

While this show began with what felt like a simple question, “How do I look at time as a formal study within my immediate surroundings?”, it quickly became slippery and multifaceted (delicious). Because, as I wrote in my last post, a day is everything and nothing all at once. We bring our history, our hopes, the sediment of past experience, imposing ourselves always onto life as it unfolds. This show, while visually documenting light and shadow ended up being a show about value and attention.

It feels complicated to make paintings while the world burns in so many visible and invisible ways. Painting remains the evergreen act that steadies me. It is the compass I keep pointing toward meaning. It is where I return when the outside world competes for my attention.

Today I came across a post about a letter Claude Monet wrote during World War I. In it he said, “Yesterday I resumed work. It’s the best way to avoid thinking of these sad times. All the same, I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and color while so many people are suffering and dying for us.” The day after the WWI Armistice, Monet offered his Water Lilies (Nymphéas) to France; a symbolic monument to peace. A few moments later, I scrolled further and read a quote from Trump threatening to end Iranian civilization. Truly disgusting.

The world is fractured, and the tension and conflict between making and witnessing is not new. I imagine it isn’t any easier either. The whiplash is painful. But as we know, one can feel sickened, heartbroken, and in grief and simultaneously seek out the touchstone of beauty. There is important truth there for me. We need to witness the world as it asks to be witnessed, dualities and all.

Spending spring break in the Sierras felt like an answer to that impulse to stay awake. It was deeply rejuvenating and full of good memories, the kind that seem to arrive without effort and then settle into the body. Everything unfolded with ease. We found the most amazing roadside barbecue just as the sun was setting on the drive up, saw two bald eagles in their nest on a hike, tromped through melting snow and pelted each other with snowballs, and fell asleep each night to the rising and falling croaks of peepers.

Over the weekend I saw a great Betty Woodman and Elizabeth Murray exhibition. Their playfulness, their permission to explore, and their refusal of solemnity without sacrificing rigor stayed with me for days. I loved how Woodman would make paired backdrops for her ceramics. Their work left me full in the best way. There is such generosity in work that remains curious, that risks delight, that allows form to stay alive and moving. The contrast with the Tristan Unrau show was stark. It left me feeling strangely drained, the way empty sarcasm can. Woodman’s work, by contrast, replenished something and reminded me that rigor can coexist with joy.

After my opening, in early May, I’ll head to Big Sur for an artist residency, which feels like the perfect comedown after the intensity of finishing this show. A week in the woods: space to listen, to walk, to think, and perhaps most importantly, to begin again. I’m looking forward to the quiet after so much concentrated effort, to whatever new questions begin to surface once the noise of the deadline has lifted. I feel profoundly lucky. The miraculous task, perhaps, is to continue to choose to remain awake to all of it and choose the light.

Ty

For the press release, I wrote a poem instead of a statement. It circles themes of nature and politics, two forces that feel increasingly inseparable to me. The body in the landscape, the landscape in the body. Both subject to systems larger than themselves. Both changing slowly, until suddenly they are not.

Back in LA, I am in the studio each day preparing for my solo in April. My movements feel monastic; feet planted, facing forward, arms moving repetitiously like prayer. My body is anchored in these cycles, while my mind circles the themes emerging in the work.

This new show, opening in April, is organized around twenty-four hours. I am using a day as a framework (I love a boundary I can press against). I am painting these “hours” over the course of months, stretching and compressing them as if they were elastic. It feels slightly absurd. A poetic sleight of hand. Time is slippery, and I am pretending I can cup it.

Outside the studio, time feels accelerated and scarce. Not elastic, or something I can control. My children are growing fast. My eldest is taller than me. Their faces are rearranging themselves while I am cooking dinner and answering emails. Deadlines approach quickly, and beyond them I cannot quite see what comes next. But I do notice lines forming on my own face and understand, in a way that is no longer theoretical, that I am aging. This is what all the women I know talk about now. We are middle-aged.

Maybe that is why I am fixated on a single day. Twenty-four hours is both everything and nothing. It is one rotation of the earth, and within it we share meals, read maddening headlines, have sex, fall asleep. Invisible things also happen: temperatures rise as pollution gathers, a friendship deepens, a mood shifts. Nature moves on its own timelines beside ours. A dormant volcano decides to blow. The scale of time vacillates between immense and intimate.

Lately I have been trying to spend my days bent toward encountering beauty, not naively or sentimentally, but deliberately, in a political way. Painting is how I gather my scattered thoughts and place them in one direction. It is how I slow and capture the spin, and it’s the work I’m meant to do. And yet I am not sure I am presenting anything new.

Perhaps this is the same self that has always shown up in the studio, concerned with cycles, with light, with the tension between control and surrender, and trying to grasp something ungraspable. Maybe the framework of twenty-four hours is simply another way of articulating what has always been there. I do not know. I’m still too much inside it.

In down moments, I look for clues in other art forms. I search for songs with “time” in the title. The word appears everywhere, across decades and genres.

• Take Time

• Crooked Piece of Time

• Time in Space

• Now Is the Time

• Nick of Time

• It’s About Time

• Keeping Time

• Time, Honestly

• The Time We Have

• Night Time

• All the Time

• All Time

• The Second Time

I enjoy how we all keep naming it, like leaving clues for a scavenger hunt. It’s the human instinct to press our faces against the glass of abstraction and try to name it.

In an essay Carol Dunham wrote about Rauschenberg, Dunham astutely articulates (like only an artist can) the collision and dance that happens in the studio when the ego meets the constraints of reality:

“As attempts to transcend normal notions of selfhood, the Combines explore deeply the defining conditions of personality. They are the products of a solitary and somewhat isolated consciousness working improvisationally with the matter and emotions directly at hand, a projection of Rauschenberg’s mind and body onto the intimate and alienated world of the studio. In a sense they are all one thing, the aftermath left by the sensitive and acquisitive tidal wave of the artist’s awareness as it crashed into reality and then receded.”

I love this summation. In the physical act of making, the self crashes against the reality of the world and something new is both born and extinguished. The imagined sketch dissolves as the painting arrives. The day is painted, but the day itself is already gone. I metabolize time into memory. Beyond that, there is no security or concreteness.

From a Buddhist perspective, which I am no expert in, we have the opportunity to awaken to any moment. Any given moment can be met in a multitude of ways, depending on the thought we choose. Through this lens, living is a very creative and malleable thing. Time exists in this equation as the skeleton of constant, dependable change. It is the architecture that holds both emergence and loss. It is the only stable thing: that nothing stabilizes.

Painting does not stop any of it. I know that. But it is a place where I can stand inside the rotation for a moment. For now, that uncertainty feels honest.

I look forward to sharing more updates soon on Paris & Los Angeles.

See you on the other side of Spring.

Warmly,

Michelle

Rain, how many days I can stay off instagram , and scribbling down New Year’s resolutions with haphazard joy is the pentameter of my current moment. It’s one of my favorite rituals, full of hope, building, and reinvention.

I also love collecting decanted resolutions by other artists, writers and musicians. Susan Sontag’s are great. There’s a lean & mean New Years resolution list Anne Truitt documented in Daybook in the 1970s, one I’m fond of and considering trying on for size:

• Get up at 5:00.

• Work hard.

• Do not think about money.

• Do not be afraid.

While finishing my show in Shanghai a few months back, I agreed to an insane timeline for another exhibition. I’ve chipped away at a small bit of it already but starting next week I have fourteen weeks to make a solo show. Suddenly the theme of structure and how artists make space for uncertainty on a budget timeline feels very interesting to me.

At a friend’s 50th birthday party last month, I ran into an old acquaintance from the Bay Area; an artist who built a strong career for himself that I’ve always enjoyed catching up with. Naturally we started talking about art and life and toward the end of our conversation he said casually, that he missed the Michelle Blade magic in my paintings.

My magic? The phrase landed with some weight, more than he probably intended. I’ve turned it over countless times since that night. What magic did he mean specifically? The work from 2018, when I was still in grad school? The literal glitter and stardust that has since resolved into something quieter? Have I lost something? Or has the work simply moved somewhere he didn’t yet know how to follow?

One of Joan Didion’s well-known New Year’s resolutions famously reads, “Keep on nodding terms with the people you used to be.” What my friend may have been responding to wasn’t absence, but a loss of recognition. Magic, I’m realizing, doesn’t disappear so much as migrate. It changes its address and thus creates a moment when the viewer’s memory lingers behind who you’ve become. His comment was a kind of mirror, but reflecting back not who I am, but who I’ve been.

His comment arrived at a fertile moment. And even if it’s lingering like a ringing bell, I’m grateful for it. Because the question remains: what do I want my magic to be at this point in my life? Where does it live? And how do I build the tools, both internal and practical, to reach it, inside and outside of the studio?

Here is where Truitt’s list circles back. Boot-camp strict but inwardly generous, it feels less like a productivity mantra than a moral stance. It doesn’t prescribe content, it sets conditions. Perhaps that’s its real usefulness: a framework sturdy enough to hold doubt, risk, and ambition at the same time. Perhaps it can serve as my pentameter for the next very focused three months.

Part of this regiment will be tending to and cleaning out the mind garbage - the accumulated noise that dulls attention and flattens desire. Every year I promise myself a meditation practice and every year it slips away. This year I started early, downloaded an app for guidance, and for now, it’s holding. I’m interested in developing my practice of Loving Kindness, or Metta, and for clearing enough space to hear myself think.

I’m hoping this shift makes me more present, more tender, more forgiving. That it frees energy for the things that actually matter. And that, with an open hand, but without spectacle or nostalgia, some of this migrating, evolving magic finds its way into the new work I’m making.

Wishing you all a very happy New Year

Other Notes on Inspiration :

– A handsome woman I saw at Bub’s the other day, wearing a fedora and looking incredible. I recognized her as a director of Emma with her signature cane with a shot glass on top, fashioned after Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

– Running with friends again is such a delight. I especially love exploring the Arroyo Seco this way. The other day I discovered a historic tile maker’s home while out on a run. The current homeowners had forgotten their drill out in the garden just and it was about to rain so I tucked it inside their porch. As I walked up I noticed the most beautiful colored tiles lining the pathway to a stunning handmade fountain, all by Ernest A. Batchelder, a leader in the American Arts and Crafts Movement.

– The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny. I’m completely captivated by this book. If you don’t know it yet, it’s incredible.

– This interview with Katherine Bradford and Heidi Zuckerman. It’s so sweet and inspiring. I love how Bradford champions community and talks about using color intuitively.

-I’m looking forward to IT’S A BEAUTIFUL WORLD (2014) — An Intimate Doc of David Lynch in India, screening at the Philosophical Research Society, Jan 17 from 7pm to 9:30pm PST

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I’m in the post-show, postpartum lull—an emotional hangover that arrives after every exhibition. For me, it’s a mix of lightness, relief, contentment, emptiness, and a heaping serving of self-consciousness. While talking on the phone with a friend, we compare the peculiar flavors of this energy that floods in after a big show comes and goes.

When I was a new mom nursing my girls, if I heard any baby cry anywhere in the world, I’d instantly leak through my shirt. The letdown was uncontrollable and came with a rush of embarrassing feelings. This cycle now is not the same, but it’s not entirely dissimilar. The spotlight and my ego love to wrestle in my brain at this time. I remind myself I’m working on it, turning again to the Buddhist teachers I love for guidance on how to manage the mental chatter. I’m embarrassed to even be writing about it—how self-aggrandizing an artist’s mind can be. ( This recent episode of 10% Happier with Jack Kornfield was helpful )

This morning, I opened Anne Truitt’s Daybook randomly to July 2, 1974, and like a breadcrumb placed exactly where I needed it, it clarified something in me. Thank you, Anne—and thank you, bibliomancy.

“I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses. If artists embrace this view of themselves, they necessarily have to attend to its perpetuation. They have to live it out. Their time and energy are consumed for social purposes. Artists then make decisions in terms of a role defined by others, falling into their power and serving to illustrate their theories. The Renaissance focused this social attention on the artist’s individuality, and the focus persists today in a curious form that on the one hand inflates artists’ egoistic concept of themselves and on the other places them at the mercy of the social forces on which they become dependent. Artists can suffer terribly in this dilemma. It is taxing to think out and then maintain a view of one’s self that is realistic. The pressure to earn a living confronts a fickle public taste. Artists have to please whim to live on their art. They stand in fearful danger of looking to this taste to define their working decisions. Sometime during the course of their development, they have to forge a character subtle enough to nourish and protect and foster the growth of the part of themselves that makes art, and at the same time practical enough to deal with the world pragmatically. They have to maintain a position between care of themselves and care of their work in the world, just as they have to sustain the delicate tension between intuition and sensory information.”

The art world is in Miami this week, and I’m grateful to be tucked away, alone, in the studio again. I get a text from Michael, my curator, and Andrea, a beacon of light—selfie from the fairs—and it makes me beam. Meanwhile, my dog is playing with my studio mate’s pup, Ziggy; they are completely in love. The roll-up door lets in the cool, blue, wintry L.A. light, and I make tea. I’m leaning into the feeling of beginning again. My new studio and the sounds of the women around me are grounding. Their kids scooter and skateboard in the parking lot as we swap holiday plans and art-world gossip. All of these pieces of life are a much-needed counterweight.

Earlier today, while stretching a canvas, I had a flash of an image—the wall it might hang on, the verticality, the colors. Thank you, universe, for the first little puzzle piece nudging me into the next phase. I can finally start the first piece for my next show, happening in the spring here in L.A. No rest this year.

Painting guru Amy Sillman once said, “All accidents and experiments, and discoveries, are what my work is about.” Yes. Completely. I concur. This is my lane; this is how I find my stride. It’s my favorite, truest part of painting and what feels like life to me—it’s very alive. Recently, I heard Yo-Yo Ma describe Bach’s “Prelude” from Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major—the beautiful piece he’s so well known for—as a piece of music that “holds the infinitude of the world.” I can see and feel what he means by this. The literal landscapes and emotions it evokes. Sometimes painting feels like that to me and when I show up this way, when I allow the accidents and the conversation with the paint to lead, I’m rarely bored. The obnoxious chatter quiets and something larger than me takes over.

The artist and writer Dave Hickey once said, “Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition.”

I think about this quote often, especially when the world feels so unstable. Hickey is saying that beauty is enough. That it can be the subject. That it is not a distraction but the embodiment of emotion, memory, resistance, and meaning. It is a way of insisting that complexity can be present, even in luminosity.

Spending six days in Shanghai to install and open a show I’ve been working on for what feels like an eternity, during one of the more challenging years of my life, was a kind of bliss I never expected. An American artist represented by a Taiwanese gallery, working with a Chinese museum, while my American gallery went AWOL—this year has been a roller coaster in every direction. But from the moment I landed in Shanghai with my curator, Michael, and met up with my gallery touchstone, Yachu, everything shifted. What unfolded was one of the most beautiful and emotionally resonant exhibition experiences I have ever had.

The team at the Powerlong Museum is extraordinary - seasoned, patient, dedicated, and full of thoughtful ideas. The kind of professionals one quietly hopes for but never assumes. Working with my curator, who brought so much life and clarity to this show, and to the entire trip, was a gift. (And everyone adored him) Together, this large and generous group assembled a stunning presentation of five years of my life as seen through my paintings. Walking through the five galleries, it felt as if my daughters, my friends, my lover, my neighborhood, my beloved trails, and so many of my favorite memories were there with me.

At the opening ceremony I shared the Hickey quote and some thoughts on facing beauty. I spoke about the fire and the period after, when I was alone in my studio trying to find a path forward. I explained how slowly, as spring came, I would return to Altadena, noticing the landscape shift through the wildflowers emerging in the rubble. And I spoke about how choosing to look for beauty felt like a challenging insistence on possibility; how it was important for me to encapsulate devastation and regrowth sitting so close together.

Modern and contemporary art discourse has long privileged theory, critique, and conceptual rigor over sensory pleasure or emotional resonance. Beauty is often dismissed, called decorative, feminine, unserious, or politically neutral, especially when a woman centers it in her work. So when we choose beauty anyway, fully aware of these dismissals, the choice becomes subversive. It asserts that beauty carries its own meaning and force. It challenges hierarchies by claiming beauty’s power and insists on its worth.

While I walked through the galleries something I realized was how beauty behaves when you let it. It gathers. It gathers memory, rupture, desire: all the small dailiness of life. And there is no embarrassment there. It holds it all without apology. While I may have internal battles, these paintings are not embarrassed that I am a mother painting my children, or that they show love and heartache, or quiet devotional moments. In that unlikely confluence, while these paintings were in Shanghai being tended to by hands from different countries, speaking different languages, all of us were able to speak the same visual grammar. It was in the recognition from this group, in their candid remarks that they had never experienced such an open and emotional show, that Hickey’s idea came into sharper focus. Beauty isn’t the soft option people accuse it of being. It’s the thing that refuses to collapse when the world suggests collapse is the easier route. Through the planning of this exhibition, I felt, not just my own doggedness but the persistence of those who helped carry the exhibition into being. Beauty, in that sense, is not sedition alone but an allegiance. It’s an allegiance to the life these paintings were born from, and to the people who stayed long enough to see them clearly.

In the Buddhist line of thought, the mind is always building the room it stands in. And as I type this entry I’m aware that beauty works that way too. We make it as much as we find it.

Below is a little beauty for your eyes—a few memories, meals that felt like minor miracles, and a handful of Shanghai vignettes that will be forever pressed into my mind.

This week I’m going to riff on Lauren’s sentiment with a col…

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Interview with Laurie Nye, October 2025

MB: Hi Laurie, thank you so much for agreeing to chat with me about your show “This World Only”, currently up at Philip Martin Gallery. Before I dive into specific questions about the exhibition, I’d love to start with a more general question- What do you love and what do you hate about painting?

LN: I can’t say I hate anything about painting. I’m sure when I was trying to figure out how to make the paint do things I wanted, it could be daunting when I was a young student. But I remember making a painting of a trout fish, my freshman year and discovering the way varnish and oil mixed together to make it “glassy” and transparent. That was the first discovery I made in my youth that made me aware that, ohhh, there is a whole world to explore here. And I never looked back.

What I love about painting is that it is this parallel world I live in and can escape to and it’s always a part of me, it’s how I see everything through color and through an “other” route. I just think about things differently, after being a painter for so long. I think I’m more alert to the beauty and darkness of this place we live in and more present because of painting. It’s such a pleasure and privilege.

There’s nothing I hate about it bc even when it’s frustrating or something isn’t working, it’s an opportunity or an opening to something more.

MB: I love this answer. Even the moments full of friction can be informative- without those moments in the studio where would our real growth stem from? I love a good wall to push against personally.

MB: Walking around your show, many of your paintings present as portraits of individual environments, each holding a cacophony of energy within them. Trees, fields, lakes are icons, and swimming inside them are details and imagery that feel like allegories. Can you tell me about the juxtapositions of these literal internal and external landscapes? What conversation are you prompting in your viewer? And could you also share what internal/external relationships you are having while making these works?

LN: This is such a good painterly insight, Michelle, thanks for this question. There’s definitely Allegory in the painting and it’s something that is in and out of the work, more so lately. At one point I thought of color as my form of symbolism in the landscape and lately I’ve revived the use of more pictorial cues to hint around at a narrative or allude to something outside of the beauty and enticement of color. “The Furies” for example, are based on Greek and Roman myths about these chthonic goddesses that seek vengeance back on earth on man for his many sins. I’ve been having feelings, angry at what’s going on in our country and so yeah, it was time to explore that feeling and allow some more subtext within the paintings.

Some paintings are more reflective of happier moments, like a visit to the park with my momma in TN. There are also allusions to celestial phenomena like comets or distant stars. The sky gives us something vast to get lost in and it’s so accessible, we just look up and it’s a remarkable reality, so much bigger than our tedious problems.

MB: Thank you for sharing your personal insights, especially what you are feeling while working. I think painters project so much psychic energy onto the canvas and obviously not all of that is visible to the viewer. It’s so valuable hearing from the artist directly about what the paintings are steeped in. I can really see your use of color as symbolism in your work. Perhaps your pallet is The Furies at work.

MB: I see this show as a kind of hybrid—Southern Gothic meets West Coast aesthetic. At first, I thought these might be opposites. One is based more in the macabre and the heaviness of history, while the other is based in seeking expansion and rugged individualism. Within your current show, pieces of these worlds feel almost interchangeable. How do these themes combine in your work?

LN: Yeah, I see that too. I think that I started out thinking about what landscape could be to me other than a place. It’s also about feelings for me. There are moments I allude to that are actual memories and then there are also just feelings that I am working through that carry me through visions that I want to share and exclaim, especially now. Early on, during the pandemic, the landscapes were a place of solitude for me, a place to explore the act of painting itself and more recently they have felt more loaded with urgent signs and messages. Maybe they are guiding me somewhere new.

MB: Can you tell me about Mimi’s Garden and Cornfield? These two were personal favorites of mine, and I’d love to hear the stories behind them.

LN: Mimi’s Garden is an homage to my friend Mimi Lauter, a wonderful, fantastic artist and exceptional gardener. Her work is so entwined with her garden and I’ve loved seeing it evolve from just an empty lot into a verdant utopia that I liken to a garden you’d pay admission to get into. She recently moved up state and it was sudden to me and this painting was from our last garden visit here in LA. I took a picture of one small corner of her paradise and did a super basic pencil sketch of it. From that, I made the painting. It’s kind of a love letter to my friend and her impact on me, I’m sad she moved but happy she is starting again in a new blank spot that will surely become another verdant haven.

Cornfield started from an idea I’ve had for awhile, driving around TN, always seeing cotton, soy and cornfields around and wanting to eventually paint it. It started with a simple sketch that I worked from and became somewhat abstracted as I painted it. I enjoyed that and just went with it. It’s got a strange perspectival point of view, somewhat flat and depth at once.

MB: Do you have a personal favorite among the works in this exhibition?

LN: I love the painting “Night Thoughts”, it came together quickly and easily and embodies my need to be reflective and calls out to the experience of collective awe and respect for nature and natures wisdom. It captures a serene moment and calls out to something bigger. It’s a little melancholy I think but I’m sure no one else sees that but me.

MB: Sometimes the ones that fly out of us have a real honesty conveyed. I’m drawn to the idea of collective awe too, it’s a powerful teacher.

MB: I have just one last question- What does the last piece you complete for a show tend to reveal or teach you? And what was the final work you made for this one?

LN: The final work was “Night Wings”. I’m not sure what to make of it in regard to its placement in the series but I loved making it because it was a last minute move that I had not planned out. I typically make a totemic flower painting within a series and this time instead, I decided it would be a bat. I love bats and have been hiding them and also highlighting them in my work for years. I wanted to pay homage to my “shadow”. Across some traditions bats represent rebirth, transformation and intuition and for some others they may symbolize something darker. Bats, to me, are my spirit animals, they are guides that reveal truths, others do not see or choose to not see. If painting could do anything for me it would be to reveal an unknown.

This week I’m sharing a very fun project I recently collaborated on with my friend Nik Gelormino. Nik is an incredible artist and just began a new printing/publication project called Top Secret Press (secret blown!) out of his studio. With this project he invites artists to create a woodblock print and aids them on running a small edition. For our print I chose to create a carving of one of my favorite trees, a Jeffrey Pine on Mountain Street, near Allen, on the Pasadena/Altadena border. You can see it towering from blocks away and it’s truly stunning with its limbs full of personality.

After Nik and I made the prints we thought it would be interesting to take it a bit further and separate the run into two editions- the original, beautiful black-brown ink he chose - and a number of hand-painted prints I worked on. Of the hand painted edition, each one is painted with a unique pallet.

It is a very intimately sized run, and I am happy to share that you can find them all HERE, starting today, until they are gone.

A little story about the tree image:

During the fires, when my community’s neighborhood and children’s school burned down, I had a vision of the tree I mentioned above, during an evening meditation. In the vision I became a version of the tree, growing roots, becoming unwavering, strong, peaceful and continually growing. The message was received, I needed to be the Mother Tree for my family and put my fear away. I held onto this vision while I packed our house and moved my children to a new home and school. A month or so into this process I attended an auction downtown and serendipitously locked eyes on a one-of-a-kind print by Sister Corita Kent that stopped me in my tracks. It read You, lady are the tree.

Kent taught and made much of her art at Immaculate Heart, where I also attended Middle and High School years later. Her work and ethos was fundamentally infused into the IH environment and influenced me in formative ways. For years I’ve been keeping an eye out for the right piece of hers to add to my art collection. I took home her beautiful print that weekend and it lives with me now as a daily reminder.

It’s my hope that these print editions can be a reminder, or an invitation, for you to reflect on what season of life you are in and what you’d like to embody. Perhaps it can serve as a touchstone for you like Corita’s is for me.

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omething extra for your eyes and ears- this beautiful woodblock print for a beautiful album, “Tree of Forgiveness”.

RIP John Prine

1. The Formosa happy hour before openings is still great. A shared meal at the Cannonball bar is the way to go.

2. The Calvin Marcus show was disappointing but the Manoucher Yektai was not.

   

3. The Josh Smith show at Zwirner has some excellent painterly moments. Especially in the first room of the gallery. Jake and I followed up the show by listening to his new album- it hits that art-student music note and made me feel nostalgic for my KXLU years.

   

   

4. “With loneliness comes freedom” / A new note I came across while working with Pascal on my upcoming print. I want to see a book published full of artists notes hung in their studios. There is currently a sumi ink drawing of a clock hanging on my wall that says Sense of Urgency under it- a quote I took from a Thomas Keller interview.

5. Pascall told me a story about making an etching with Chagall where he wanted more texture and grabbed a wire brush and began running it and tapping it over areas of the plate. He went on to talk about which artist he has worked with who are obsessed about the process of art making and which ones sent their “minions” to do the work for them. I really am fond of him.

   

6. On Sunday I tried oil painting at Jake’s studio while I helped him prepare for a studio visit. This is how I want to spend all weekends. I’m so grateful. My painting turned out okay but what was great was being pushed into it.

7. I have a new file in my notes on my phone titled Art Questions/Problems and my first question is, Is it vain to sign your name on the front of your painting?

8. My next show is approaching quickly and my last show hasn’t even shipped. Feeling waves of self consciousness and heart palpitations galore! It’s not my first rodeo but somehow I always forget how hard this moment is and it’s surprising when I’m here again. Like childbirth amnesia. How do we continually start again?

9. The Rebecca Morris show at Regen was an array of strong classic Morris hits. I ended up buying a copy of Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022 and it’s brimming with wonderful essays and has a great visual timeline in the back showing all her studios.

   

10. After a conversation with a dear friend I’m thinking about the theme of audience and how sometimes it finds you and other times you seek it out with a kind of desperation. Sometimes an audience can be an anchor in the studio and that is definitely not where they belong. I’m looking to feel untethered. Here is a great interview with Rickey Laurentiis on Between the Covers that touches on the topic of audience.

11. From boom to bust: When things were soaring almost every artist I know became hyper professionalized and catered too often to their collectors and the speed of demand. What’s exciting in this moment of bust is how many artists I know are unraveling that obligation. It’s the deep reset moment after the breakup when you remember what feels most authentically you and move toward that.

12. The path is the whole thing / Do the necessary footwork everyday / What is Your Why (especially in this embarrassing political climate)

13. Nik Gelormino has a Top Secret Press and we are about to release something together in two weeks.

Over some months we circled through the possibilities of printmaking, exploring how each kind might align with the way I work. They understood, as artists and printmakers themselves, that I would need a certain type of process to wander within. They also knew the choice of printer mattered as much as the technique. The right printer would have to share a working ethos, philosophical in nature. I didn’t realize then how right they were. They paired me with master printer, Pascal Giraudon. Nearly eighty, Pascal has been making prints since his early twenties, first in Paris at Atelier Lacourière where Picasso, Chagall, Matisse, Calder, Giacometti, Henry Moore, Miró, and many others passed through, and later in the United States, where he opened his own studio in 1984.

While all these decisions and details were congealing, life turned. Pascal was diagnosed with cancer and began radiation treatment which made him too weak to work. Around this same time Patricia and Emmett lost their home, studio, and entire archive in the Eaton Fire this past January. The devastation held everything in a mournful limbo. But we kept talking, meeting for coffee and checking in. Their dedication and drive persisted.

I am beyond grateful to say that yesterday I spent my first long day in the studio with Pascal. He greeted me with a grounded warmth that felt steadying. Now cancer-free, he carries an unmistakable hunger for life. He spoke of plans to sail around the world as he led me around his studio. The space, brimming with a life dedicated to printmaking, has a place for everything; shelves marked with yellowed handwritten labels, every tool refined through years of use. Standing there, I felt the accumulation of a lifetime, the kind of space that can only be made through repetition and patience.

Pascal began to teach me: aquatint, sugar lift, drypoint. Time and pressure. Baths and rinses. He inked the plates, then buffed them with chalk on his hands, moving across the copper with a grace that felt like quick breaths. I watched his movements in silence, realizing he was showing me not only technique but also a way of being inside the process. As we worked side by side, we spoke about marriages, lovers, children, art making and freedom. Hearing him speak about his desires at his age was refreshing and widened my sense of what a life as an artist can hold.

After lunch I began painting the background for our large plate with a spit bite technique. As I leaned over and spat down on the plate, I brushed on the salty mixture and watched it settle momentarily onto the surface. Pascal encouraged me to take my time and I found myself getting lost in the movement of the liquid across the plate. Similar to painting with water colors the mixture kept moving and changing. I watched the medium pool and move abstractly across the plate, settling into shapes that mimicked shadowy branches. Pascal checked in often, encouraging me toward more layers, more depth, and to move toward darkness and mystery. I loved his suggestion. This simple permission, in the course ordinary life, to follow the exploration- insisting and inviting in the mysterious.

After I rinsed the plate clean, a shadowy, oxidized image became visible. We dried and cleaned the plate with solvent, and Pascal smeared and blended blue, green and yellow ink freely over the plate and ran it through the press. The first iteration of our print, and a document of our first day working together, was made. It was delicate and ghostly. We studied it and he gestured to the areas to lean into more, adding how the techniques he taught me earlier would be applied in separate plates to create a full, diversely textured, final image.

I look forward to sharing more as things progress. With more long days of work ahead, I’m feeling so grateful for moments of collaboration like these. Serendipitously, I listened to an episode of The Huberman Lab called “How to Expand Your Consciousness” to and from Pascal’s studio. It gave me language for what I was already feeling. My “perception box” had shifted, just a little, through this process.

For your pleasure, here are some images of Pascal’s handwritten notes to himself, peppered throughout the space. Quiet reminders of persistence, and of the life contained in process itself.

Merci

This afternoon I’m sitting in my car beneath a tree while my daughter is at her aerial silks class. The windows are open and a warm breeze filters in. I have just left the studio after a strong painting day, one that leaves me unsettled in the way discovery does. My thoughts scatter: to emails unwritten, to the sawhorses in the back of the car, to the small space at home I keep meaning to clear for watercolors.

A message from my gallery interrupts this moment. They need a final list of works for my upcoming museum show. I resist. The paintings and drawings on my desk are still accumulating and I want to stay with them. Paperwork feels like a sobriety I am not ready for. Yet the preparations move forward with the measurements, titles, spreadsheets, insurance quotes. Today we drafted the press release. It is beginning to feel real.

The exhibition title arrived a couple weeks ago through the dreams. (I love how patient you have to be with titles and this process did not disappoint.) In the dreams, the act of swimming feels both illicit and taboo. I swim alongside others, we all keep this act individual but have a shared respect. My body knows what to do and I’m good at it. I travel long distances, returning to the same entry point each time. It’s inevitable. By the fifth dream, which came in the wake of a big meeting with my curator, I found myself only watching from the onramp, longing to return. I woke, seeking an interpretation, and this is what I found:

From Chat GPT

Water is the primordial symbol of the unconscious—of psychic depths, of origin. A river, in particular, is the flow of life itself: time, fate, the stream of psychic energy. The Los Angeles River being concretized and hidden mirrors the way modern life represses and channels instinctual life. Swimming in it shows you entering repressed psychic territory, reclaiming life-energy from a neglected, “unnatural” place.

And further:

This dream might be showing you how you’re navigating your own power in hidden ways—moving through overlooked, unacknowledged realms, finding freedom in secrecy, and building a relationship with an underground current of creativity or resilience. It could be an image of your artistic life itself: thriving in spaces others ignore, drawing energy from what’s considered marginal, finding beauty and velocity in what is usually dismissed as wasteland.

The Jungian synopsis rang true, and the title of my show revealed itself: The River. From that vantage I could see, with momentary distance, the larger arc; not just of the past five years of painting, but my life’s broader journey as an artist. The river became a metaphor for unconscious depths surfacing in the work, for hidden energies feeding resilience, for beauty found in difficult places. The dream gave me a framework to understand this body of work not only as a response to wildfire, upheaval, and transformation, but as a reflection of the deeper currents that have carried me all along.

This November, those works will be seen together for the first time. The River, curated by Michael Slenske and organized with the support of Asia Art Center, will span five galleries at Powerlong Museum. It will present paintings, drawings, and mixed-media works made between 2020 and 2025, opening in the midst of Shanghai Art Week.

This exhibition feels like a current I’ve been carried by, now visible in its fullness. As a teenager, I would run along the LA River from Los Feliz to Atwater, stealing moments of independence. Over the years I watched the river shift: first encased in concrete, then gutted for renewal, and now, decades later, alive with herons, massive trees, and fish. Overgrown and tangled, it collides with the city in uneasy beauty. Trash lies scattered; confetti with a shadow. That too is my life, glittering darkness and all. To spend time organizing and building an exhibition of this scale is my attempt to honor that force and energy—its secrecy, its persistence, and mystery.

And then the hour ends. I roll up the windows, pick up my daughter, and talk with her about her day as she eats her snack. The dream river recedes, and I wade back into the beautiful quotidian current. The two rivers, the unconscious and conscious, secret and daily, running alongside each other, shaping the ground I move across. I love shifting between these two modes and feeling the residue from each. This is the true service of art: to recognize in the flow of our everyday lives the same deep current that runs through dreams, carrying both forward as one. I just need to get in, trust the current and my movements, and to let it carry me forward.

More river/swimming content for your pleasure:

This little gem features a collection of letters, written between June and October 1907, to his wife Clara, after seeing a retrospective exhibition of Cézanne’s work at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, a year after Cézanne’s death.

The letters he sent her aren’t conventional “love letters”. They are letters of artistic sharing; dispatches from an artist in the act of discovery. They are an intimate combination of art criticism, personal discovery, and spiritual reflection. While Rilke is learning to see, we as the reader, also get another portrait of a glimpse inside a marriage between two artists. Clara herself was a sculptor and had studied under Auguste Rodin. Rilke writes to Clara with the kind of urgency that suggests he’s not only processing Cézanne for himself but also hoping to spark something in her artistic life as well. This is how two artists show love for each other: the gift of attention and shared vision. His words speak to their intellectual partnership, their shared passions, and the trust that she could hold and honor his evolving artistic consciousness.

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What makes these letters so rich is how they trace Rilke’s process of learning to see. Cézanne’s paintings become a kind of school for him, not only in understanding how meaning is created through painting but also in showing him how he might become the poet he needed to be. In one 1907 letter, Rilke describes Cézanne’s layering of colors so that they speak to each other, independent of the painter’s will:

“The color is in no way employed descriptively. It makes no concessions. Instead, it lives, with an independent life of its own. One would think it was in the painter’s interest that the colors should be left entirely to themselves, so that they could work together as they please.”

This quote felt electric and full of magic to pick apart. Cézanne’s genius, as Rilke saw it, was to let go of color as representation and instead reveal color as a reality in itself. The painting doesn’t “describe” the world; it is a world constructed out of autonomous, living colors.

What a revelation for a poet! Rilke came to see how he could similarly allow language to lean against itself until something greater emerged. He wanted his poems to stand before the reader as fully as Cézanne’s paintings stood before the viewer. It’s beautiful to think of these modalities trying to articulate the same thing about presence—one is attempting to document perception being made solid through painting, and the other seeking documentation of perception made verbal through writing. In both cases, the artist doesn’t impose meaning—he makes space for the world to show itself, and in showing itself, it transforms the beholder.

Like building up meaning in layers, Rilke repeatedly returned to stand, sometimes for hours, in front of Cézanne’s paintings. He continued to write Clara about his revelations, understanding more and more about Cézanne’s use of color and the undercurrent of their “colossal reality” and philosophical approach.

Rilke wrote:

“…As if these colors could heal one of indecision once and for all, the good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates you; and if you stand beneath them as accepting as possible, it’s as if they were doing something for you. You also noticed a little more clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it’s natural after all, to love each of these things as one makes it: but if one shows this, one makes it less well; one judges it instead of saying it. One ceases to be impartial; and the very best—love—stays outside the work, does not enter it, is left aside, untranslated; that’s how the painting of sentiments came about.”

Here Rilke expresses that Cézanne’s colors have a kind of honesty. They don’t waver or pretend to be anything else. A red is red, a blue is blue. And he feels that clarity is almost healing. When you stand in front of his paintings with an open mind, it feels like the colors are doing something to you—teaching you how to be steady, decisive, truthful. Personally, I don’t know how I feel about color, clarity, and honesty. How do we know an honest color from a deceptive one? Are all color honest? Definitive statements like these tend to make me feel uneasy because I feel they shut down the conversation.

But here is where I feel the statement above takes a surprising turn and gets interesting. Rilke warns that love itself can get in the way of art. Because to “love” what you’re painting (or writing about) risks sentimentality. You might idealize it, project onto it, or judge it. He feels the real task is to hold back our love because the truest love allows the world to speak for itself. This is the recognition of an ego in surrender.

When I read this, it felt like a mic drop. It’s such a beautiful sentiment. But my ego wanted to argue, how is that even possible? How do we not bring emotion into our work as artists? In grad school, “sentimentality” was shorthand for failure: your work was naïve, unsophisticated, not rigorous enough. “Intuition” risks caring the same stigma. It’s too soft, too feminine, not a voice worth trusting. And yet here was Rilke suggesting that the deepest love is precisely the one that doesn’t impose itself. Wanting the world to have autonomy, allowing it to speak for itself. That is a beautiful, radical proposition. But how, as artists, do we do that without our voices inevitably shining through? This is a question I know I’ll enjoy grappling with through the act painting for sometime.

In short, this book was all-around heavenly to devour. Cezanne’s art and Rilke’s insights remind me that art is a vessel for endless attempts at approaching the truth, without needing to resolve it or put meaning on it. These letters capture the truth of how an artwork (a book, painting, film, or performance) can change us. It can alter our very perception of the world and make us aware of our aliveness, and connectedness. This one-sided conversation does leave me craving Clara’s perspective though. It is unfortunate, that we do not get to read her responses. I am now on the hunt for more artist-couple discourse, letters, or examples of work possibly overlapping or in direct dialogue. Please send recommendations.

Ten out of ten, highly recommend.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite Rilke poems:

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"Let this Darkness Be a Bell Tower" by Rainer Maria Rilke

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29

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Other recommendations for this week:

• A wonderful episode with Jeffrey Gibson on “A Brush With” podcast where he speaks in detail about his use of color and his rebellion against “sophisticated norms” in the art world. Please do yourself a favor and listen. I felt myself lit up by the clarity with which Gibson articulated his practice.

• This touchstone NYT plum torte recipe

• If you are in LA, visit The Lummis Home in the Arroyo and be charmed

Keep it Loose

Late in the afternoon on a very warm Saturday last month, my boyfriend and I ordered a beer and a side of mezcal at Manuela. We had just spent the day seeing two amazing summer shows: Noah Davis at the Hammer Museum, followed by Henry Taylor and James Jarvaise at Hauser & Wirth. As painters, we found the quality of these shows stunning, inspiring, and draining for all wealth they brought to the table. As we tried to come back down to earth, we took turns asking each other what the work had taught us, and what we’d each take with us into the studio.

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I first met Noah Davis when he had freshly moved from NY to LA, after his time at Cooper Union. He was sharing a flat with his brother and I had come over for a visit. I remember catching a glimpse of him from the doorway, sitting on his bed, drawing directly on the walls above it with a stick of graphite. Circling the room was the most beautiful swooping and textured drawings of cherubs and clouds floating in the empty space of the white walls. He impressed me instantly.

A few years later, while I was in grad school and preparing my thesis exhibition, he became an important touchstone. We’d chat on AIM and send each other images of what we were working on. At the time he was making a show for Roberts & Tilton: the exhibition that ended up changing everything for him.

Walking through the Hammer show was emotional. Noah was a real master, and it was beautiful to see his work again in person. Afterwards, we went downtown to Hauser & Wirth for Sometimes a Straight Line Has to Be Crooked (arguably one of the best show titles ever). The show paired Henry Taylor with his teacher, California modernist James Jarvaise (1924–2015). It was a gorgeous dialogue between the two: Jarvaise, who recognized something vital in Henry as a young painter in the 1980s, and Henry, whose work carries that lineage while remaining entirely his own. Their paintings sang together, side by side.

Later, sitting at the bar, Jake and I pulled out some takeaways. Here are a few that I have been marinating on-

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Takeaway One: Keep it loose

Seeing both Noah and Henry Taylor’s work hit me like a soft hand to the cheek. The looseness is everything. I already knew that mantra, but these shows were a wake up call. Lean into it more, much more.

Looseness is where the magic lives in painting. By loose I mean letting the paint drip, bleed, or stay translucent. Letting a line show through, or a shape melt into abstraction.

When I’m tight, nervous, craving control, everything feels flat and numb. The colors stiffen, the work shuts down, and honestly, it’s boring. Painting (especially wet-into-wet) demands that I surrender at least half the control and let the medium do its thing. Let it bloom, bleed, even get ugly. Collaboration with the paint itself is essential.

Looseness creates space for risk. And without risk, there are no breakthroughs. The poetry lives in all the looseness.

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Takeaway two: Steal, borrow, soak it up, make it your own.

Noah borrowed a lot. He painted from his mother’s photographs, made a Jeff Koons, painted Rothko landscapes, reappropriated famous architecture and still made it authentically his own. In Sometimes a Straight Line Has to Be Crooked Taylor exhibited his version of Luncheon on the Grass #12 by Manet and it’s been haunting me for weeks. It felt so energized, contemporary and confronting.

Picasso said it: great artists steal. It’s our responsibility to look at as much art as possible, learn from it, absorb it, and recontextualize it through our own temperament. Synthesize everything you encounter into the richest brew you can make. The best tea possible.

With this takeaway, I realized how ready I am to fold more direct stealing from art history into my own repertoire. As a form of preparation, I’ve been haunting my local library, lugging home stacks of catalogs. It’s been fun to let bibliomancy play a role in the process, allowing the randomness of what jumps off the shelf to spark new directions. Unexpected references, accidental collisions, strange echoes: it all becomes material.

Takeaway three: Build your own palette

This one came from the Jarvaise/Taylor show. Both artists use limited but unforgettable palettes. Taylor especially, whose color is instantly recognizable. It’s his signature.

For me, color has always been an ongoing wrestle. In grad school, one instructor offhandedly suggested I might be colorblind, and over time others have echoed the thought. Maybe my sense of color really is strange? Maybe I can’t see what others see. I honestly don’t know. But maybe that’s exactly the point. What feels “off” to someone else might be my way in. Either way my palette is mine to keep building.

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Last Takeaway: Love your community

We’re not in competition, and we can’t do this alone. We’re responsible for lifting one another up through studio visits, collaboration, sharing ideas, and showing up. It’s crucial.

Noah was extraordinary at this. He carried a vision that was contagious. Being around him lifted you up. He lifted everyone up. When he introduced me to people, he’d say, “This is Michelle, she’s family.” Every time, it landed deeply. Every time, it meant something.

Last call

Looking back, what struck me about both exhibitions was how much they mirrored life as much as painting. Noah’s clarity, Henry’s looseness, and Jarvaise’s generosity all formed a reminder that making art is inseparable from how we live.

When Jake and I were sharing drinks and talking about our love for painting, it was obvious: this choice to live as painters frames almost everything for us. To keep it loose in the studio is also to keep it loose in life. To let go of control, to flow, to allow mistakes and surprises to become the heart of things. To build your own palette is to claim your unique voice in a world that often asks for conformity. To love and support your community is to recognize that none of us can carry this work alone. We need each other’s vision to stay alive, awake, and brave.

Art teaches us how to be. And sometimes, standing in front of great paintings, the lessons arrive quietly; other times they land with force. Either way: steal what inspires you, keep it loose, build your palette, and love your people.

Image/painting credits in order: Henry Taylor, Noah at the Underground Museum, Taylor and Jarvais installation at Hauser & Wirth, Henry Taylor, James Jarvais, Faith David, Noah Davis, James Jarvais, Noah Davis, Noah Davis

Seven years ago, I began a devoted practice of drawing from life. I was living in Portland with a new baby and toddler when I first picked up a rainbow pencil someone had gifted us. I bought a sketchbook and began to look around, attempting to capture fragments of our life. The first thing I drew was a waxy daffodil in my front yard. I loved how the rainbow pencil removed some of my control: its prismatic colors emerged unpredictably, making each drawing feel psychedelic. This combination echoed a feeling of my wide-eyed state as a new mother in transition. That first sketch lasted only a few minutes before I was pulled away, but from then on, I stole any moment I could during naps and between feedings to return to drawing.

Artist Agnes Martin often spoke about her art as a record of states of being. Her geometric lines and grids were rooted deeply in her seeking serenity. Her marks were full of thoughtfulness, attunement and presence. I love thinking about Martin working out in the high desert, finding moments of clarity through all her repetition and restraint, surrounded by a spectacular version of nature humming in its own structured rhythm. (Years ago I was lucky enough to visit the circular gallery specifically built to house her work at the Harwood Museum in Taos. They held a sunrise yoga class and if you are ever able to do this, I highly recommend it.)

I love getting lost in the world of an artist’s line -like Martin, David Hockney, Kerry James Marshall, and Raymond Pettibon. Their marks reflect years of authenticity and their specific type of seeing in the world. Their images reek of personality and obsession.

In my early years of drawing, the frustration I felt interrupted my flow constantly. My lines felt clunky and I could see the self consciousness in the shape and weight. As the muscle became stronger I noticed I became better at slowing down. I also began to see more, notice more. I became vigilant at being present.

Drawing, for me, is not a grand gesture or a means to an end, but a way of being. The philosopher Maurice Merleau. Ponty wrote that perception is not passive reception but reciprocity; the body and the world meeting halfway. My practice lives in that exchange: capturing the detritus of family life, the palm trees and gardens of my East L.A. neighborhood, the shifting mountains I pass on morning runs. Sometimes I draw in real time; other times I collect photos to revisit. Either way, the act itself feels devotional.

Making drawings and paintings about my life is a choice to deeply know it. In a culture that tries to constantly steal our attention, and keep us numb, this type of slowing down feel radical. Drawing deliciously insists that perception still matters and demands the suspension of ordinary urgency in the process.

Years later, I am still drawing with rainbow pencils, still practicing this quiet form of fidelity.