Stop looking at those glossy, sun-drenched Instagram reels of artists sipping champagne in lavender fields and telling you that a “complete guide to plein air painting” is merely about finding the right light. It’s a lie, or at the very least, a highly curated half-truth. In my twenty-six years of running a gallery, I’ve seen […]
I remember a Tuesday in mid-November, twenty years ago, when a young painter arrived at my gallery with a stack of canvases that were essentially just expensive laundry. They were unvarnished, the edges were raw and scuffed, and they smelled faintly of damp studio floor rather than professional intent. He thought the “art” would speak […]
I remember sitting in a drafty corner of a Basel fair twenty years ago, nursing a lukewarm espresso and watching a frantic young painter realize that his “global breakthrough” was actually just a very expensive way to pay for a gallery’s freight insurance. Everyone talks about international representation as if it’s some magical, shimmering doorway […]
I remember walking into a former client’s basement in 2008—a lovely oil on canvas, 60x80cm, 2002—only to be met with the unmistakable, cloying scent of mildew and damp cardboard. They had spent thousands on the piece, yet they were keeping it in a space that was essentially a slow-motion execution chamber for fine art. There […]
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; […]