Stop treating color theory like it’s some sacred, mystical ritual that only happens in a high-end studio with expensive pigment sets. I spent twenty-six years watching artists approach their palettes with a sort of reverent hesitation, as if picking the wrong shade of ochre would somehow offend the gods of fine art. It’s nonsense. In […]
Stop wasting your inheritance on those “complete masterclass” kits that arrive in a shiny box filled with nothing but mediocre pigment and pretension. I spent twenty-six years watching well-meaning beginners throw money at expensive, pre-mixed sets, thinking that a heavy price tag would somehow bypass the grueling necessity of understanding medium chemistry. If you are […]
I remember a young painter in my third year of running the gallery—a brilliant boy with heavy, textured oils—who walked in with a series of stunning canvases that he’d decided to “save money” on by using thin, flimsy clip-on borders he’d found online. I watched a collector walk right past his entire wall because those […]
Stop performing for the security guards. There is this pervasive, exhausting myth that if you walk into a museum solo, you are somehow required to adopt a look of profound, intellectual suffering—as if you’re one wrong glance away from being exposed as a fraud. Most people treat a solo trip like a high-stakes exam they […]
Stop treating the history of renaissance sculpture in italy like it’s some divine, untouchable mystery handed down from the heavens. If you listen to the academics, they’ll tell you it was all about the sudden, miraculous rebirth of humanism and the spiritual awakening of the soul. That’s a lovely story for a textbook, but it’s […]
Stop listening to the romanticized nonsense about the “starving artist” finding inspiration in a drafty, overpriced loft in a gentrifying warehouse district. There is nothing poetic about a damp ceiling that ruins a £3,000 canvas or a landlord who views your creative practice as a mere tax write-off. When artists start searching for how to […]
I remember sitting in the back of a drafty, unheated warehouse in East London back in the late nineties, watching a brilliantly talented painter try to explain to a potential collector why he couldn’t find the invoice for a sold landscape. He was surrounded by masterpieces, but he was drowning in a sea of loose […]
I remember sitting in my back office in 2008, staring at a stack of crumpled invoices and a notebook that looked like it had been through a war, trying to figure out if a particular landscape piece had actually sold or if I’d just imagined the commission. Most people will tell you that you need […]
I remember sitting in the back office of my gallery in 2008, nursing a lukewarm espresso and listening to a young painter weep because a piece he’d sold for five hundred pounds had just flipped at auction for fifty thousand. He felt cheated, as if the universe owed him a cosmic correction, but the reality […]
I remember sitting in the back office of my gallery in 2008, staring at a contract for a landscape painter who had just signed a deal with a high-end stationery brand. He was beaming, talking about “passive income” as if he’d just struck oil, completely oblivious to the fact that the agency had carved out […]