Studies

These pieces are smaller in scale, but not minor. I think of them as studies in the old sense of the word: attempts to stay with a single image long enough for it to stop being decorative and become diagnostic.

Most of them begin with a painting and remain close to it. Instead of building a full argument, they try to register a pressure: a posture, a color, a silence, a historical contradiction, a mood that refuses to dissolve.

Good places to start:

• The Fortune Teller
• The Soothsayer's Recompense
• The Cyclops
• The Bolshevik and the Weight of an Idea
• Adele Bloch-Bauer I
• The Demon Seated

If you want the longer argumentative pieces where these images open into essays, go to Essays.