The studio letters did not begin as an attempt to clarify my work. They began because certain thoughts had no place to go once the drawing started.
There is a stage in the studio that exists before form. At that point, ideas are unstable. They resist coherence. Some eventually become images. Many do not. The letters belong to this stage. They are written before resolution, before interpretation, before a work is expected to justify itself.
They are not explanatory texts. They are not captions, and they are not intended to guide a reading of the work. Their function is different. They record attention at the moment it occurs, without asking it to settle into meaning.
I write the letters from the studio, not as reflection afterward. Sometimes they interrupt the act of making. Sometimes they take its place. They follow the same line of thought as the work but move without the same obligation to decide. An image must commit to structure. A letter does not.
The decision to send them privately was practical. The letters are not designed to be consumed in groups or skimmed. They are written to be read once, by one person, without context or performance. This preserves their provisional nature.
What enters the letters is limited and specific: observations that resist visual translation, the conditions of the studio on a given day, a hesitation that persisted, a work that could not be made. I do not revise them into essays. I leave the uncertainties intact. Precision matters more than polish.
The letters are not supplementary material. They are part of the practice itself. They hold what cannot be carried forward once a piece begins to stabilize.
Their purpose is not to explain the work. It is to remain alongside it, without intervening.