I remember a Tuesday in mid-October, years ago, when I walked into an artist’s studio for an open house that was supposed to be their “big break.” The room smelled of cheap lavender candles and desperation, and the artist spent forty minutes explaining the metaphysical significance of their color palette to a woman who clearly […]
I remember standing in a drafty convention center in Basel, nursing a lukewarm espresso and watching a colleague spend three thousand pounds on a booth that looked more like a high-end boutique than an art space. Everyone around me was whispering about “brand visibility” and “market penetration,” but all I saw was a frantic, expensive […]
I remember sitting in a drafty corner of my gallery in 2004, watching a collector stare at a landscape for twenty minutes, trying to sound profound about “the emotional resonance of the artist’s hand.” It was exhausting. People love to wrap themselves in the velvet curtains of art theory, but they often miss the point […]
I remember sitting in my back office in 2004, staring at a stack of invoices for shipping, insurance, and lighting, wondering why a young painter in my stable thought a “complete guide to exhibiting” was something you could find in a glossy textbook or a university syllabus. They all thought it was about the mystique—the […]
If you think getting a feature in a major art journal requires a glossy, five-figure PR agency and a black belt in corporate jargon, you’ve been sold a very expensive lie. I spent twenty-six years watching “experts” charge artists a fortune to send out generic, soul-crushing press releases that editors treat like junk mail. The […]
Oil on canvas, 40×40, 2014. I remember standing in my old gallery, watching a collector squint at a piece that was essentially just a mountain of dried, expensive mud. He was prepared to pay four figures because the artist had applied the paint with a trowel, but he couldn’t articulate why he felt the urge […]
I once spent a frantic Tuesday afternoon in a client’s basement, staring at a stack of oil on canvas that looked less like a curated investment and more like a slow-motion disaster. They had spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on works by artists they loved, only to tuck them away in a space that […]
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 […]
I remember sitting in the back office of my gallery in 2008, watching a collector stare at a spreadsheet provided by a “specialist” that looked more like a work of fiction than a financial document. He was convinced his dusty assemblage of mid-century abstracts was a gold mine, but the numbers were inflated by nothing […]
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 […]