“According to Todd” is an all-illustrated chapter that depicts the climactic events of the novel through the eyes of the character Todd, a delinquent teenager confessing to a violent crime from prison through a series of kaleidoscopic drawings. The sequence is composed of three five-panel acts in which Todd’s imperfect memory and hallucinatory imagination are interwoven with elements of narratorial omniscience to create a dark, phantasmal reflection of the novel’s primary tragedy. The drawings are rendered in ink and paint marker on watercolor paper, and were developed in the summer of 2021. The originals are now part of Tess’s private collection.

Buy the book at Penguin Random House.

The reference photographs for these paintings were created by tracking various light sources within a moving frame at long shutter speeds, resulting in photographic impressions that then get "photo-realistically" rendered in oil on panel. This entanglement of media disrupts conventional modes of interpretation in spite of its deeply conventional subject, and the ideas we have about what we see become increasingly fraught by a Möbius loop of visual code-switching. Each painting is a unique portrait that probes our intuition of form, value and time, bringing us to a peculiar edge of what is tangible to our visual imagination.

Within the science of light, of course, lies a similar ontological knot: not only do we observe that its nature appears to be two things at once, but the more we try to measure it in one way, the less capable we become of doing so in another.

The wonder and confusion we experience in response to these ineffable images reifies our human affair with light, provoking a deep and instinctive desire for clarity and identification, yet refusing to award any answers to the grasping mind.

-2022