Notes From a Scattered Summer

Summer studio time has a rhythm that doesn't always cooperate. San Diego doesn't get brutally hot, but the days that do get warm are the days the paint moves differently — dries faster, drags instead of gliding, fights back more than usual. So this summer became a game of catching the good windows. Early mornings, later evenings, the odd overcast afternoon that felt like a gift. Paint when it's cool. Wait when it's not. Repeat.

One of piece worked on this summer.

Everything I made this Summer

Looking at everything I made over the last few months, it doesn't read as a series. It reads as a stack of one-offs; pieces that each solved their own private argument and then moved on, without much connecting one to the next. There's a version of me that finds that unsettling. Series-thinking is supposed to be the disciplined way to work: pick a question, stay with it, let a body of work accumulate around it. Instead I've got a pile of individual answers to different questions, none of them talking to each other yet.

But I've stopped fighting that read on it. Some summers are for making. Some are for noticing what you made and figuring out what it's actually about. This one was the second kind. The next series is already circling. I can feel the shape of it even if I can't name it yet, and I'd rather let it arrive properly than force a theme onto pieces that were never trying to be a set.

What made the scattered feeling easier to sit with: the summer wasn't just studio time in isolation. A few real, tangible things landed that gave the work somewhere to go.

I'm now working with Roam Hardware here in San Diego — a partnership that puts the work in front of exactly the kind of local, in-person audience that's been part of the plan for a while now. Having a piece live somewhere in the city, not just online, changes how it feels to have made it.

Illumine in Palm Springs is the second one, and it's a different kind of room entirely — different light, different pace, a different collector walking through the door. Good pressure. The kind that makes you think about how a piece holds up outside your own studio walls.

And I'm part of The Pop-Up Project's Los Angeles show, which is its own kind of expansion — six days, international emerging artists, one room in the middle of LA. That one required actually sending work out into the world to stand next to work I've never seen in person, made by people I've never met. There's something clarifying about that. You find out fast what your own voice sounds like when it's not the only one in the room.

None of these solve the "everything feels like a one-off" problem directly. If anything, they add more scattered energy — three different rooms, three different conversations, three different audiences. But they've also made the in-between feel less like drifting and more like gathering. The next series doesn't have a name yet. It has three places it's already being tested in, and that might be exactly the mess a real body of work is supposed to start from.

More soon — from the studio, once it cools back down.

— Samuel