Close Looking No. 4: Butter

Christina Habibi

Butter, 2026
30 × 40 × .75 inches
Acrylic, spray paint and oil on canvas

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In Butter, a mark I hadn't used in nearly twenty-five years returned to the painting. My mother used to call these looping marks “scribblins.” There was a time when they appeared in nearly everything I made. Then they disappeared.

I didn't decide to bring them back. My hand just started making them again. They move somewhere between writing and drawing, with the rhythm of language but without anything that needs to be read. Their familiarity surprised me. After so much time, the gesture was still there.

What interests me is that the scribblins didn't return to the same kind of paintings they left. They now pass across a surface built from a very different vocabulary: heavier forms, interruptions, fragments of text, spray paint, areas that collide or partially cover one another. Something from an earlier period has entered the present without either one having to accommodate the other.

I think we often expect change to produce a clean sequence. One version replaces another, one period ends and the next begins. But experience rarely organizes itself that neatly. Older ways of thinking, making, speaking, and seeing continue alongside newer ones. Sometimes they disappear for years and surface again in circumstances that change what they mean.

That is how I see the scribblins in Butter. They are not a return to an earlier painting language. They have been absorbed into something that did not exist when I last used them. The distance between then and now remains visible, and I want it to.

Butter lets different versions of my painting language occupy the same present.