newyorker:

A Painting of the Sky Every Sunday, and the Art of Careful Attention

On January 7, 2001, the artist Byron Kim made a painting of a clear blue sky. The blue is, more precisely, a deep, powdery periwinkle—a twinge darker at the lower left corner of the composition than at the upper right. The not-quite-monochrome painting looks like pleasure: a day spent laid out on an off-season California beach, fingers nested behind your head, gazing upward. Below the blue, on a naked stripe of wood panel, are a few words written by Kim. “Clear, snow melting dripped into the painting,” he wrote. “Every Sunday?”

That question quickly became a practice. On just about every Sunday for the past seventeen years, Kim has made a painting of the sky, accompanied by a few lines of diaristic rumination. (He isn’t perfect—“Despite carrying a panel in the car all day yesterday, I forgot to do a Sunday Painting,” he wrote on May 7, 2012, a Monday.) Now a selection of more than a hundred of the paintings, arranged chronologically, can be viewed at James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea. Until the show’s closing, in early February, a fresh painting will appear every Sunday, giving the exhibition some of the inexhaustible iterability that characterizes Kim’s subtle, intelligent, and quite moving project.

I really want to go see this.

But I probably won’t.