Oil on canvas, 60cm x 80cm, 2014. I remember looking at a particularly luminous landscape during a mid-winter opening, feeling the exact moment the room shifted from polite chatter to actual commerce. Most people think a private view is just a glorified cocktail hour where people sip cheap Prosecco and pretend to understand abstraction, but […]
I remember a Tuesday afternoon in my old gallery, sitting across from a woman who had just inherited a collection of mid-century abstracts. She was terrified, clutching her handbag, convinced that if she didn’t find a “specialist” with a velvet-lined office, she was being swindled. She’d been told that understanding how dealers buy from private […]
Stop looking for a magic key or a secret handshake to get through those heavy gallery doors. Most of the advice you’ll find online—the kind that suggests you need a glossy, high-concept portfolio and a way to “network” your way into a cocktail party—is absolute nonsense designed to make the industry feel more exclusive than […]
If you search for a “complete guide to galleries” online, you’ll mostly find two things: breathless, romanticized nonsense about “discovering talent” or cold, impenetrable industry jargon designed to make you feel like an outsider. I spent twenty-six years behind a polished mahogany desk, and let me tell you, the reality of the gallery system has […]
I remember sitting in a drafty backroom of a London gallery in the late nineties, watching a collector stare at a large-scale gelatin silver print with the same skeptical squint one might reserve for a confusing tax return. He wasn’t looking at the composition or the light; he was looking for the brushstrokes. For decades, […]
I remember standing in my gallery during an opening in 2008, watching a serious collector squint at a piece of mixed media on linen, 40 x 40cm, 2005. He wasn’t looking at the brushwork; he was staring at a wall label that read like a thesis on post-structuralist semiotics. He looked utterly lost, and frankly, […]
Stop thinking that mastering the anatomy of a human skull is the secret to how to paint a portrait. I spent twenty years in a gallery watching collectors walk past technically perfect, “correct” faces to stare at canvases that felt like they were breathing, and let me tell you, the distinction is rarely about the […]
I remember a young painter—talented, earnest, and utterly terrified—standing in my gallery ten years ago, clutching a canvas she’d made during a period of intense personal struggle. She wasn’t looking to show it; she was looking to liquidate it because her rent was due. She asked me, with a voice trembling like a leaf, about […]
Stop treating a gallery visit like a silent prayer in a cathedral. Most people walk into a room, stare at a canvas with a look of forced profundity, and wait for the “art” to happen to them—usually while feeling an immense, unearned guilt because they don’t know the right vocabulary to justify why they like […]
I remember a man in my gallery back in the late nineties—a lovely, well-meaning gentleman who had just dropped sixty thousand pounds on a series of large-scale abstract oils. He came back to me six months later, looking slightly frantic, asking if he could “rebalance his portfolio” by offloading the pieces to fund a new […]