The Myth Eaters

Notes from the midst of a new painting cycle.

*All images by the author. Images are all details of recent works and works in progress from my winter residency at RuptureXIBIT, London, on through 1 March, 2026.

I must be painting the unsayable world. I think this as I sit and stare at the tumbling chaos in front of me. The usual languages—the news language, the theory language, the myth language, even the “progress” language—keep failing or, worse, keep laundering what’s happening. Paint becomes maybe the only honest speech left: it drags, interrupts, won’t resolve, because any sort of resolution would be a lie. I don’t know how all of this hangs together other than in Myth, perhaps that’s why we feel like we are in this great unraveling (polycrisis).

In tracing how misogynistic violence isn’t an “issue” over there in a separate box, it becomes clear that it is and can never be isolated as a stand-alone issue, rather it pulses as a river, a structural current that runs through everything—myths we call beautiful, museums we trust, technologies we pretend are neutral, the industrial sublime, the concept of “progress” as empirically important, perhaps the point, maybe this narrow path creates the social contract itself—so the question isn’t “why is it in the myth” but “why do we keep desiring it, excusing it, calling it historical, training women to translate fear into gratitude, and then acting surprised when the algorythm learns our cruelty and scales it.”

Sometimes it is beautiful, the painting, I suppose because both of these things can be true. Beauty and violence are not far apart, at the edges of extreme emotion art is most at home, and painting becomes necessary. Sometimes there is airy space, Turner’s clouds, the hope of the intrepid explorer, thinking the plundered world will forever continue to open to the hand of man in bounty. But what do we crush while we reach? Who do we systematically exclude, undermine, extract from?

The brush skips right over the seams, I sometimes forget they are there, this compulsive, tender, circular attempt to make wholeness in a nonsensical world—making a wound where there wasn’t one, suturing it, watching the Real shimmer through the seam—that’s almost what it feels like to live inside conditional reality: stitched together stories, fraying at the edges, pretending to hold. And somewhere inside all this, the personal becomes the only Real - my research, my saturation into the why, the exposure of the ubiquity of casual discard - has infected my capacity to trust anything—love, desire, even my own impulse—so the work perhaps becomes an act of self-construction under collapse, painting myself into existence while pulling at the thread of the pastoral lie, half sick with it, half still wanting to hope I’m wrong.

More than half of the process of painting is just looking. And so I continue to look. “How do you know what you want to do to the painting?” Ash asks me. What a question. Asked in a way I’ve not been asked before. I don’t have a way to answer. I try - and a long, rambling attempt to talk about seeing without looking, feeling, impulse, balance, color, surprise tries to come out, some sort of discussion about what the painting wants, but none of these explanations can convey what it is to paint. What that delicious almost really is, why they come out so surprisingly, why they are disappointing when they are only chaos, or only beauty.