Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns, installation view
Fuchsia, acrylic, puff paint and collage on canvas, 180 x 120cm, 2025
Fuchsia, detail
Fuchsia, detail
Fuchsia, detail
Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns, installation view
Fuchsia is the first painting to be shown from a new series of figures subject to various states - overwhelm, anxiety, focus, wonder etc. All these states-I go through, and painting, is something I use to absorb, regulate, witness, and celebrate these different capacities.
Luca asked me where the title, Every Day I Bear Witness to the Birth of a Thousand Suns came from; 'just from my head' I replied. I had already asked Chat GPT if it was attributed to someone. It told me it sounded like J.Robert Oppenheimers take on the Bhagavad Gita.
In the morning, when I don't have work, I get up, go for a run, then write down the ideas I have on the run, meditate, and drop myself into 3 hours of Stable Diffusion before going to the studio. When I first used Stable Diffusion, I had never felt something rewire my brain so fast. I spent the entire week walking around with a lightning bolt in my head, electricity crackling at my fingertips. I basically go to the studio now to decompress.
I have been training LoRA models on my paintings... witnessing the intensity in the results, world after world blossoming out of the latent ganzfeld noise, the deep space and the raw computing power of it. I can get far outside myself, and yet, I still feel tethered. I'm trying to get that into my painting... somehow.
It's all textures, collapsing and reconstituting. Painting can be exciting like this, but its slower, always slowing. There's this idea that painting can act as a de-noiser. Like the process of generating an image in Stable Diffusion, after a certain point, the painting undergoes a fresh noising and something new emerges.
The deep intuitive work, the back and forth of making a painting can be done in the Ul too. 30 outcomes at a time. Filling out new pockets, bringing it all into the surface. Every new painting I make, is fed back in a recursive loop. Each scrape and scratch, blot and bleed, absorbed by a second entity; reproduced into a thousand suns. The slow painting part is just a part of the process.