I remember sitting in my back office twenty years ago, staring at a digital file sent by a promising painter that looked more like a blurry smudge of grey than a vibrant oil on canvas. He had spent three months on the piece and three minutes on the photo, and quite frankly, he’d just thrown […]
I remember sitting in my small gallery office, nursing a lukewarm Earl Grey and staring at a submission from a lovely painter whose work was, frankly, transcendent. But her artist statement? It was a dense, impenetrable thicket of “liminality,” “juxtaposition,” and “interrogating the zeitgeist” that made my eyes glaze over within three sentences. I didn’t […]
I remember sitting in my back office ten years ago, staring at a painter who had just been rejected for the third time by a major arts council. He was talented, his work was vital, and he was utterly devastated because he thought he hadn’t been “artistic” enough for the committee. He’d treated the application […]
I remember sitting in my gallery office ten years ago, watching a young painter—a brilliant, raw talent—weep because she’d spent her entire year’s savings on a “prestigious” three-month program in Tuscany. She thought she was buying a career, but all she’d actually bought was a very expensive view of an olive grove and a certificate […]
I spent twenty-six years watching young artists walk into my gallery with eyes full of wonder and pockets full of nothing, most of them convinced that if they didn’t have a degree from a prestigious academy, they were essentially invisible. They’ve been fed this expensive lie that the “Art World” is a walled garden accessible […]
We need to stop pretending that an expensive degree is a golden ticket to a solo show at a Mayfair gallery. I spent twenty-six years watching bright-eyed graduates stumble into my gallery, clutching impressive portfolios but possessing absolutely no idea how to price a canvas or, more importantly, how to talk to a collector without […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded, overheated studio opening in the late nineties, watching a young painter try to explain away his blatant theft of a contemporary master’s color palette as “a dialogue with the lineage of the medium.” It was nonsense, of course. He wasn’t in a dialogue; he was just […]
Stop waiting for a lightning bolt of divine inspiration to strike your studio floor; it’s a romanticized lie that keeps talented people broke and staring at blank canvases. I spent twenty-six years watching artists agonize over the “sacred mystery” of how artists find their subject, as if they were waiting for a sign from the […]
I remember sitting in my back office in 2004, staring at a stack of canvases from a young painter who had just spent three years chasing every passing trend like a frantic magpie. He thought he was being “versatile,” but to me, he just looked like he didn’t know who he was. There is this […]
I remember sitting in the back of a dusty studio in 1994, watching a young painter spend four thousand pounds on heavy-bodied oils and Belgian linen, only to realize his composition was fundamentally broken because he’d neglected the charcoal stage. We are constantly sold this lie that “art” begins with the expensive materials—the thick impasto, […]