I remember sitting in my back office in 2008, staring at a catalog for a mid-career landscape painter, trying to explain to a very confused, very polite collector why the auction house’s figure looked nothing like the artist’s studio price. There is this pervasive, almost sacred myth that how estimates are set is some sort […]
Stop obsessing over the perfect gradient; collectors aren’t buying your technical ability to blend cerulean into titanium white, they’re buying the mood that sky creates for the rest of the piece. I spent twenty-six years watching artists struggle with how to paint skies, often resulting in a heavy, muddy top third that effectively strangles the […]
I remember sitting in a drafty corner of a municipal museum in the late nineties, watching a young painter stare at a blank wall with a look of pure, unadulterated heartbreak. She had just been told her work was “too commercial” for a public collection, which is a polite, institutional way of saying they had […]
I remember a young painter—lovely girl, talented, but utterly terrified—who once sat in my back office, clutching a contract like it was a death warrant because she couldn’t tell the difference between a giclée and a lithograph. She thought she was being “exclusive” by limiting her run, but she was actually just confused, and her […]
I remember a Tuesday afternoon in 2004 when a collector walked into my gallery, stared at a pile of discarded industrial felt for three minutes, and asked me if I was actually joking. He wasn’t being rude; he was genuinely confused by the gap between the physical object and the price tag. This is the […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded studio during a mid-career workshop in the late nineties, watching a young landscape painter struggle with a massive, muddy canvas. He was surrounded by every expensive pigment imaginable, yet his forest looked less like nature and more like a pile of wet spinach. He was searching […]
I remember sitting in a drafty, white-walled studio in 2004, watching a young painter try to explain why his work couldn’t be called “Abstract Expressionism” because it was “too emotionally urgent” for such a reductive label. It was exhausting. The industry loves to pretend that how contemporary art is categorised is some sort of divine, […]
I remember sitting in my gallery back in 2004, nursing a lukewarm Earl Grey and watching a young painter walk in with a contract that looked more like a mortgage than a partnership. He was beaming, convinced he’d finally “made it” because a prestigious-sounding entity wanted to represent him, completely oblivious to the fact that […]
I remember standing in my gallery’s back room in 2008, staring at a $4,000 landscape that had arrived from a studio in Cornwall looking like it had been through a literal war zone because the artist thought a bit of bubble wrap and a prayer was a “complete guide to shipping artwork.” The canvas was […]
I remember sitting in the back of a crowded auction room in London, watching a woman—a lovely, sharp-witted collector I’d known for years—get caught in the rhythmic, hypnotic trance of the auctioneer’s gavel. She wasn’t bidding on the work; she was bidding against the person sitting three rows ahead of her, driven by a sudden, […]