Sleep Has His House

Following a harrowing night of emergency calls, Frank, played by Nicolas Cage in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, arrives at the apartment of Cy, a drug dealer. The space feels like a fantasy of relaxation. The walls are painted in dark red and deep green. There’s a painting of a volcano, quietly emitting real […]

Head Above Water

Upon encountering a cabbage floating in the River Thames, the main character in Russell Hoban’s The Medusa Frequency hallucinates: the cabbage becomes the severed head of Orpheus, drifting in the current, murmuring stories. An image that borders on the absurd, almost comical. According to myth, after the Maenads, raving female followers of Dionysos, tear Orpheus […]

Thresholds

I very nearly burned down my studio while preparing the mockup for this painting in 2009. I wanted the light in the center to look undefined, so I piled up a chaotic mix of materials: cotton, paper, plastic foil, and a generous amount of steel wool. The light source was a chain of Christmas lights, […]

Ring a Ring o’ Roses

Rubens’ Dance of Mythological Figures and Villagers, tucked into a corner of the Prado, may be small by his scale, but it’s one of my favorites. A swirl of bodies, sweat, and joy—this is the group dance as ideal. Sensual and communal, fluid and timeless, it’s all about shared delight. Years ago, I was invited […]

The Grass

In 1992, I spent half a year attending school in Leicester, England. Wanting to explore the area, I decided to skip class once a week and visit places that interested me. One morning, I set out to see Bosworth Battlefield—the site of the final major conflict in the Wars of the Roses, fought in 1485. […]

Machandelbaum

Machandelbaum is an old German word for the juniper tree, though today it is more commonly known as Wacholder. I used to think the name might come from Wachhalter (watch holder, or guardian). It doesn’t, etymologically, but I still like the idea. It suits the juniper’s presence: upright, quiet, watchful. Still, juniper berries are said […]

The Pissoir

I imagine women’s restrooms as places of intimacy and secrecy. Stalls remain closed, and even the traces left behind — scents, stains — carry an anonymity, as you never know who exactly was the culprit. Men’s toilets are structured differently. The pissoir, open by design, allows no such discretion. The urinal is perhaps the male […]

Beachy Head

The name Beachy Head is as bizarre as it is beautiful. It’s one of my favorite places: the towering white cliffs of East Sussex, where the rolling, pastoral landscape of the South Downs drops suddenly and steeply into the sea. For British bomber pilots during World War II, Beachy Head marked the final glimpse of […]