Why is it, I wonder, that I find myself making work about things and places few in my former enculturated city centers would take interest in while using materials many would see as garbage? I seem to identify with the forgotten and overlooked, which suggests a longterm psychological consequence of my work long overlooked in the course of those fifteen years. As for why the images in my paintings seem to dissolve further and further into abstract fields, and why sound now seems now to rival the image in terms of what compels me to make paintings, I can’t be entirely sure.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, and I don’t know how, that the word “nihil” flashed in my mind. But it simply did, the five letters, not as a brainy question or concept, but as a “pure, clear word” as poet Stanley Kunitz would put it, unconnected to anything I was doing, reading, or thinking about consciously at the time. Yet day after day, I would see this word in my mind’s eye.

For Mila Aletheia. A poem by Joshua Hagler.

In the evenings leading up to the 2020 solstice, I made blind contour drawings of the landscape in New Mexico’s Hondo Valley and Lincoln National Forest as Saturn and Jupiter inched toward their eventual conjunction. I used only available light to view my sketch pad: the remaining light at dusk, the crescent moon, street lights, Christmas lights from faraway houses, and passing cars along the freeway….