smudgy

“I’m a simple girl and I like smudgy makeup. It’s something that’s part of my character. I don’t like perfect s—, especially when it comes to my music and my life,” De Miguel said.

Smudgy cartoonlike pastels coexisted with raw plaster works and jewel boxes bedecked elaborately with wool, glass, straight pins, knives and sometimes taxidermized birds — animistic objects that resembled little else being made in the 1960s.

Though I, and much of the rest of the world, felt like my life was hurtling towards an ether of smudgy uncertainty, I came to find solace in quiet nights punctuated by "I Think You Should Leave's" wacky sketches.

To Adam, who sees her only on Thanksgiving each year, his grandmother is “stooped, squarish, broad-faced, in brown wool pants and a brown cardigan that smelled of mothballs, with scuffed leather buttons dangling loose from black threads. Short gray hair that looked like she cut it herself. Pink-rimmed oversized glasses with smudgy lenses.”

He was using shadow figures appropriated from an 18th-century diagram of the Brookes slave ship, reproducing them in rows as a serial motif across canvases that flicker between representation and smudgy abstraction and suggest the architecture of the prison.