A Painting of the Sky Every Sunday, and the Art of Careful Attention
There are signs in the Sunday Paintings of an effort to marry the passage of time, overseen by each day’s “indifferent blue,” to the artistic, domestic, and emotional exertions of a single individual.
“I’m working on a painting about the light in Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room”, he writes on one canvas; the toss-away update, with that wonderful article, ‘about’, speaks to painting’s utility not only as art-object but as a vehicle for criticism.
This emphasis on the everyday makes the Sunday Paintings cousins to the “autofiction” of contemporary writers such as Rachel Cusk, Teju Cole, and Ben Lerner, which tries to make reality, in all its boredom and tragedy, shimmer almost metaphysically.