Thursday Painting
A designated plan for newsletters
Dear friends who subscribe to my newsletters,
After many months of delving deeply into my painting practice without sharing much of it online, I am now excited to commit to a new rhythm for my newsletters, one in which I’ll bring one painting per week into your inbox every Thursday. I’ll continue to post other texts in which I discuss my theoretical insights and collective practices in my art studio (with my children and with other people), but I won’t send them as newsletters. These texts help me document my studio practice and give continuity to my intellectual path. I believe they are an offering to anyone interested in exploring the workings of an active artist studio, so I’ll link some of them in the Monday newsletter if you wish to catch up!
The Thursday Painting is for sale at a sliding scale, starting from US$111 and going up to infinity (which is truly the price of any artwork done by anyone, but we need to continue playing this capitalist game for now — I’ll be equally honored if you pay the minimum, I’m over the hump of my first experiences pricing and selling paintings in the past two years)! Reply to this email to claim it for yourself with the price you wish to pay and the address where you want to receive it, and I’ll send you a payment link. All paintings are ready to hang, although you can always take them to your local framing shop if you wish to!
One of the ways I arrived here
I turned to painting through my PhD research in art history, when I was trying to understand why an artist decided to use only black and white in his work. I somehow knew then that I was already a painter, even though I had never studied painting specifically. That was back in 2016, and since then, I have continued to approach painting through research, considering history, then materials, and finally social relations. Yet, every time I paint, I experience an unbelievable amount of pleasure, and that inevitably guides me more than the intellectual frameworks I set for myself beforehand.
In many ways, the paintings I want to do “publicly” through these weekly newsletters bring together all these steps in their making: the faces that appear now are a response to our historical moment, when I feel that we need to value human life more; the canvases were painted either with other people in my group programs at the Soil Factory or with Helena and Ulysses in an almost two year long exploration of nontoxic paint to use with the children; and the sewing and use of textile leftovers is an emergent practice bringing together my grandmother and mother’s expertise, some important encounters I’ve had with other mothers in Ithaca who are also sewing, and the values made clear through Make Mends Meet created by Kathrin Achenbach. In all these “steps” for making this painting, I’ve experienced the pleasure of painting, so these Thursday-paintings-newsletters are also a reminder for myself of how much joy the continuous pursuit of artistic practice creates!
I have so much more to write about the Thursday paintings, but I need to stop here because this text is already too long. I still want to link a few past posts I've written on my website without sending them as newsletters. If you've come this far reading this as an email, please consider forwarding this to a friend who you think might like my work! And thank you for being in touch with me through this platform.
If you wish to read more, here are some of my latest writings:
Art Share Documentation II
"All true art does not separate technique from expression; technique corresponds to what art expresses, and therefore, it is not something artificial that is learned and adapted to an expression but …
