Painting Diary

Long-Form

LATEST LONG-FORM SELECTED BY OUR EDITORS

Abandoning the slop in favour of Stairing

by Issey Scott

Our Long-Form section is dedicated to exploring current approaches to painting. Alongside some of our favorite writers, we also seek to publish written output from painters writing about painting. We want to highlight the breadth of invention and play that can come about when painters translate their voices into textual form.

"Looking up and moving towards the unknown is not something that comes naturally to the human psyche. Being asked to raise our heads above the parapet takes noble bravery, whether on a micro or macro scale."

Our first Long-Form entry of 2026 comes from London-based writer Issey Scott, who explores a pair of recent London exhibitions featuring the paintings of Basil Beattie and Tala Madani. In “Abandoning the slop in favour of Stairing”, Scott asserts the act of “looking up” as a tool to move forward through painting, and also change the way we might choose to look at the world and our relationship towards it. By taking oneself outside of one’s own body Scott frames these approaches as a brave and hopeful way of elevating ourselves from the hardship created through inaction; and to be part of a change for the better.

Tala Madani, Daughter B.W.A.S.M, 2026. installation view. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London.

Diary

REVIEWS, CONVERSATIONS & INTERVIEWS FROM OUR EDITORS

Cannon Fodder’s Chaos—In conversation with Canyon Castator

by Clare Gemima

Canyon Castator, Cry Havoc And Let Slip The Dogs Of War, 2025, oil, acrylic, and ink on canvas, 90 x 90 in. Photo courtesy of the artist

Canyon Castator, Cry Havoc And Let Slip The Dogs Of War, oil, acrylic, and ink on canvas, 90 x 90 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The Diary section is primarily dedicated to featuring conversations with painters and to critical writing covering current and recent exhibitions around painting. Our aim is to create painting conversations that are both intergenerational and worldwide.

"As I look at the earliest mythologies that shaped me, I find myself retracing the architecture of indoctrination embedded in so much of the media we offer to kids—cartoons, comics, movies, video games—packaged as entertainment, but loaded with ideological scaffolding beneath the surface."

Our second entry of 2025 is an interview between our Director and Head Writer Clare Gemima and painter Canyon Castator. This wide-ranging conversation took place at Mohilef Studios in Los Angeles in early 2025. Castator reflects on family, place, and community—and how his past and present practice weaves a multiplicity of visual language into paintings that sample and expand on contemporary culture at large.

In conversation with Andrea Zabric—Binding Time

by André Hemer

For our third entry of 2025, Founder and Lead Editor André Hemer and painter Andrea Zabric sit down for a conversation in the lead-up to Zabric’s exhibition Day’s Work, the first in a series of collaborations between Painting Diary and Vienna-based gallerist and curator Alexandra Toth.

“Sometimes I need things that I can grab onto. So I put something in that I can define. This is this. And it plays at a level of representation. As you said, this can be a river, this can be an apple, this can be a flower, or something. But it also gets another function in the painting. So it’s maybe a river, but when it becomes a part of a painting, then I think it’s a threshold between many particular things.”

In this conversation Zabric gives insights into the unique nature of her studio environments, and how this sensory and spatial experience deeply informs her work. Shaped by time, light, and tactile experimentation, Zabric makes work that moves beyond the static, creating objects that are both shaped and changed by their place in the world.

Tim Wilson, Nightstand IX, 2024, Oil on paper, 8.5 x 12 x 3in. Courtesy the artist and Painting Diary.

Andrea Zabric, Untitled (from the Umbra Series, No. VI), 2024, pigments and binders on birch plywood, Ø 24.4 cm. Photo: Serena Schettino.

Residency

OUR CURRENT ARTIST / WRITER IN RESIDENCE

Photo: Courtesy of the writer and Painting Diary

Clare Gemima

Painting Diary hosts residencies for painters and writers in a studio space in the heart of Vienna, Austria. The idea is to provide a space in which artists can work, free from outside expectations or deadlines, giving them time to revel in the intimacy of connections made and people met.

Our current writer in residence Clare Gemima (b. 1993 New Zealand) is an arts journalist, emerging curator and painter, living and working in New York. Her work centers on building scholarship for immigrant artists pursuing their artist visas, and on amplifying emergent, established, and historically overlooked practitioners working across the United States and abroad. As a writer, she regularly contributes to publications like Eazel, Impulse Magazine, Artefuse, Contemporary HUM, Art New Zealand, The Brooklyn Rail, Two Coats of Paint, Whitehot Magazine, EV Grieve, AWT, Wide Walls, Frieze, Passing Notes, New Women New York, Artsy and Painting Diary.

You can read more about Clare’'s practice and the residency program here