I remember sitting in a drafty backroom of a Mayfair gallery in the late nineties, listening to a director explain why a single print needed to cost more than a mid-sized sedan. He was talking about “market positioning” and “prestige,” but all I could see was the massive gap between the art and the people […]
I remember a young painter—talented, brilliant, and utterly chaotic—who brought me a stunning oil on canvas, 60x80cm, 2014, only to realize he’d forgotten to mark the back or the front. We spent twenty minutes in a cold storage room squinting at a smudge of pigment, trying to convince a serious collector that it was, in […]
I remember sitting in the back of a drafty studio in the late nineties, watching a young painter spend three weeks’ worth of rent on a “professional” set of graphite pencils because the brand name promised a certain kind of prestige. It was a classic case of paying for the marketing rather than the mark. […]
I remember sitting in my back office back in ’98, staring at a sales invoice for a landscape that had just gone for triple its asking price. My heart should have been singing, but instead, I felt a cold knot in my stomach because I knew the buyer was actually my brother-in-law’s business partner, and […]
If you search for a “complete guide to still life” online, you’ll be met with a tidal wave of academic nonsense about “the spiritual essence of the object” or expensive, high-end lighting setups that would make a cinematographer weep. I spent twenty-six years watching young artists fall into the same trap: they think that if […]
I once had a collector—lovely woman, terribly wealthy—who insisted on buying a massive, heavy-set oil on canvas for her studio apartment, convinced that scale alone equaled prestige. She spent three hours sweating over a drill, only to realize that trying to force a museum-grade centerpiece into a cramped living area didn’t make her look sophisticated; […]
If you think you need a velvet rope, a private concierge, or a six-figure windfall to begin learning how to start a new collection, you’ve been listening to the wrong people. For years, I watched well-meaning clients walk into my gallery with a sense of profound inadequacy, convinced that unless they were buying a blue-chip […]
I remember a Tuesday afternoon in 2008, standing in the back storage room of my gallery, staring at a crate of oil on canvas, 120cm x 150cm, 2006, that had arrived from a visiting artist’s studio. The paperwork was a mess, the insurance rider was non-existent, and I realized with a sinking feeling that if […]
People often treat hiring an art adviser like they’re seeking an audience with a high priestess, expecting some mystical ritual involving velvet ropes and whispered secrets. It’s a ridiculous notion. Most people think they need an adviser to grant them access to the “inner sanctum,” when in reality, they just need someone to stop them […]
Oil on canvas, 40cm x 50cm, 2014. I remember a particular landscape from a young painter I represented back in the nineties; the brushwork was soulful, the color palette was sophisticated, but the piece was shoved into a flimsy, off-the-shelf plastic frame that looked like it belonged in a high school hallway. I watched a […]