Author: Jeff Popovich

2024 October 6

The post below finished, not touching it again, learn when to abandon, yo, first time I used straight watercolor in months if not year or two. I’ve discovered the longer I let the first draft cure the crisper the wet interaction between first draft second draft – curing prevents the heavier from flooding the lighter. Meanwhile:



2024 October 1

Off to the shelf to dry for a week, photo in bad light of best when wet. New black, five parts black, two parts sienna and umber each, one part fire engine red, so far…

Current plan: when canvas and glue/acrylic ink completely dry, watercolor maybe, I know how gouache leaches, watercolor ink?

Another hiatus starts……. now

2024 Septanger 10

So to remove one or the other or both and add a new avatar I need register for and teach myself something called gravatar and at first glance fuck that (I would keep and/or replace the red, definitely want to delete me). I just renewed wordpress for another year, it’s not buyer’s remorse, it’s buyer’s self-contempt in service to fine self-servicing metaphors abounding

The above’s paper scissored into a rough circle and glued to the below, scissored into a rough circle, currently in the excellent book press I have access to, once solidly glued it will be put in a box and not looked at again until time to destroy the contents of that box, I know it’s not the best way to express myself to others but currently this is the only way to express myself to me

2024 September 7

Occasional reminder in case there are people now here who weren’t the last time: the above is a scan of something I made using the best scanner I have access to at the highest settings for cleanest capture the machine offers but it fails and I manipulate the image with chrome’s cheapo photo app for exposure and saturation and contrast so the original still exists and is way better than any scan I wish I could show you but the above doesn’t exist anywhere but here, fine metaphors abound

2024 August Joy

I automatically renewed my wordpress subscription because and then my old avatar which last year after renewal disappeared now reappeared beneath my current avatar and wordpress, whose AI capitalizes the W and P five time before it believes me, fuck that, way too robust for me but I like the way it displays my shit so I’m not fucking with the avatars, amen, this is standard mix of acrylicinkglue and gouache but on a shiny piece of cardboard I found in the box of the new electric razor I need buy, above dead already, drowned, mud

2024 Augustarchiving

Archiving these recent hexjeff’s against my tendency to forget to. All are gouache and acrylic ink infused in clear elmers glue, the two rimmed with painters tape part of a project I’m betting won’t see completion (and are now glued to each other, and I need write about that if only to myself in tablet with pencil, Jeff), the above (which may or not be glued to the below because the below has competition) has pencil (and if there’s a monologue associated with any of these it’s the above and will be or not at the sho(i)u(t)ty place)

2024 July 3

First two after the two week hiatus, I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I started again and that alone makes the hiatus successful

It’d flashed but never tableted that while most of these meant to spin four-sidedly in your hands I always post here the one of four on each I like best and without fail that one is the one upside-down from the orientation of the hex when permanent compositional boundaries set: whatever I make, upside-down be best and makes me laugh, and that alone makes the hiatus successful

2024 June It Wasn’t Murder, It Was Involuntary Bug Slaughter Until I Mercy Killed the Bug

Black earring in the pink Doctor Servin earlobe a live dying bug
Flew onto this canvas sodden w gouache & acrylic ink in clear Elmer’s glue
Landed at the top, dragged its ass down to the bottom, made it too
a dry spot – that orange blood trail to the left of the south Jersey
ear, the brush was the bug – and stuck, exhausted, in pain and desperately
scared, flapping its wings as I type this – wait a second – I say mercy
but what would anyone say if accused of an unwitnessed murder

2024 June 5


Just now, still wet.

I mentioned at BLCKDGRD a hiatus from these squares the week after next because – I didn’t say this there – my wife will be in Iceland with my daughter for two weeks on their dream vacation

I need process why I do this and need write in tablet with pencil to answer, what am I doing, how seriously do I take this as sustenance if I forget what I painted yesterday and how?

Two hours later (as in just now): above sopped up


The top headshot be dead, the below dying, if alive tomorrow I will kill it

2024 May Two Eyes

Don’t write a poem about
you and circles I tell me

How writing poems about
circles, the compulsion

to write them makes me
paint circles about circles

And those things I make
which I can’t call art

because there’s boxes of them
I can’t throw away in case

I get famous. Where I spot
on the spectrum I’m not sure

but am glad I was not
my third grade teacher

Why I hate revisions
Why I forget what I made
once I plunge publish
and put in a box and then seal

2024 April Four Self-Portraits, One Painting

Elmer’s Clear Glue infused with acrylic ink dropped from squirt bottle onto 8×8 cold press watercolor paper, my latest I will do this for life and master that I’ll abandon before mastering begins within (my limited – this is not modesty begging, is true – hand skills) the next month

Issue: Clear Elmer’s Glue warps the heaviest watercolor paper and even when I glue the back of one heaviest piece of watercolor paper I can find to a second heaviest piece of watercolor paper I found whichever canvas had the heaviest applied Clear Elmer’s Glue warps the second even if both squeezed immediately after gluing and tightened to the other in an excellent paper press I’ve access as muscled as I can then wait a month: released object flat as a new LP but immediately starts curling, how do I record the sound it must make?

Every two-sided hexjeff is eight different self-portraits, these scans suck, you should see them in sunlight and lamp light, if you want one let me know, some I’m keeping, most I’ll share, they’re meant to be handled and turned and flipped sixteen different ways and are by the three people read into the op (and whoever two of them may show), say someone’s toddler’s grape jellied hands and peanut buttered mouth picks up one at a showing and gnaws a corner, I’ll never be so lucky, there will never be a showing

2024 April 12

I verified the word obtain
meant what I thought it did
If I wasn’t losing language
I’d claim
language – and it’s 1035 Friday night
who the fuck is tapping at my door
this is the third time
first momcat
second neighbor cat
third the fuck is this –
gooier than gooache
I forget how to spell words now