September’s Collector’s Note brings together three paintings in which familiar things become difficult to contain. Paul Housley fills the studio until the artist is almost another item of equipment. Pádraig MacCana turns landscape into a structure of screens, borders and half-recalled forms. Bendix Harms multiplies his cat Mamon across a field of teeth, tongues and confectionery colour.

All three artists paint what is close at hand: a working life, an inherited landscape, an animal in the house. Proximity doesn’t make their subjects easier to understand. It makes them stranger.

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The first single I bought was Howard Jones’s What Is Love? Pretty soon I had big hair, a Burton suit with little multicoloured flecks, fluorescent towelling socks and patent leather pointy shoes. Then Siouxsie and the Banshees and The Mission took over. The hair became Robert Smith’s and all my clothes turned black. My friends were no less committed. Tom wore a wide-brimmed hat and spurs on his boots. Chris went head to toe in paisley. James stuffed daffodils in his back pocket like Morrissey and Simon doused himself in flour and patchouli oil like Carl McCoy from Fields of the Nephilim. Once, on the escalators at Oxford Circus, I was wearing a new suede jacket with tassels and conchos. My friend looked over and said, ‘… You look really cool.’ I heard no sarcasm, but we didn’t say that kind of thing and the compliment embarrassed me because, in that instant, I saw the pair of us from outside. We looked ridiculous. Music had reached into our wardrobes and twisted the way we presented ourselves to the world.

Every period seems to grant one part of culture an unusual authority. It sets the gestures, images and questions that everyone else must answer. It isn’t necessarily a prize for quality, popularity or profit… a form can lead a decade whilst producing acres of rubbish. The test is whether other fields begin borrowing from it and whether the present starts to look like it.

Which part of culture holds sway seems to move when technology changes the way things are distributed - new audiences acquire money and one form finds the right pace for the age. In the 1960s, cheap records, television and fashion gave youth culture reach and visibility. A song changed how the world sounded and a haircut or pair of trousers made the change public. Art supplied images and methods, but it was records, shops and magazines that carried them into ordinary life. Then punk lowered the price of admission. A single, a torn shirt and a photocopied fanzine were things you could imitate badly and still join in. By the 1980s, music videos, advertising and fashion had turned that energy into complete, exportable worlds. Art remained part of the mixture, but stylists, photographers and creative directors set the terms.

Britain in the 1990s was a noisy collision rather than a clean victory. Britpop had mass reach, rave changed how people gathered and used cities after dark and fashion produced some of the period’s strongest images. But then contemporary art forced itself into the mix… The YBAs understood that an artwork could be an object, a public argument and a media event at the same time. Damien Hirst made indifference difficult.

Contemporary art’s strongest claim to cultural leadership arrived during the 2000s. Tate Modern opened in 2000, Frieze London followed in 2003 and the circuit of international fairs, biennials and expanding galleries made art unavoidable. Collecting offered entry into social and intellectual culture. If you had money and wanted to show your cultural capital you bought contemporary art. Property developers used it to signal regeneration. Luxury companies acquired its prestige. Finance supplied collectors, while contemporary art gave some of them an identity more attractive than finance alone could manage. It became the preferred prestige language of the affluent West. Art could lend intellectual credibility to a handbag, urban glamour to an old industrial building and a trace of danger to a corporate collection. As someone involved in art, I wasn’t offended… we all enjoyed some of the reflected light.

But the arrangement concealed a weakness. The art world began to confuse financial expansion and institutional growth with cultural authority. A larger gallery, higher auction price or busier fair demonstrated the strength of its own network, but it didn’t prove that artists were still giving form to the experiences preoccupying everyone else.

The smartphone exposed the difference. It did not just introduce another cultural medium. It placed every medium inside the same distribution system. Music, fashion, film, gaming, comedy, politics, news… they all entered the same screen. Images became immediate, abundant and measurable. Cultural authority moved towards those who could command attention continuously, and away from forms that required the audience to arrive at a particular building at a particular time.

The platforms themselves became cultural leaders. They established the pace of attention and which material circulated. Content that produced immediate recognition, outrage, desire or allegiance was rewarded with further visibility. Everything else had to fight against the design of the system… Fashion adapted quickly because it already understood identity, repetition and the value of an instantly legible image. Music adapted because it could circulate in fragments. Politics discovered that a slogan, insult or mangled sentence might travel further than an argument. Influencers turned private life into a continuous public form.

Contemporary art was badly equipped for the competition. Its institutions moved slowly, while its language had become increasingly professionalised. Artists were encouraged to speak to curators, academics, funding bodies and collectors before speaking to anyone beyond that circle.

Teaching made me wary of turning that criticism of the system into a judgement on individual artists. Every year the new intake would arrive and I would think, oh Jesus, here we go again: layering and memory. Every lecturer has a private catalogue of recurring offences. Resin eggs. Sheets of something translucent hung on fishing line so that we can see both sides… But then the students and I would begin working together, and within weeks I would be fully engaged in solving the problem of how to make the breasts on an animatronic spider wobble properly. The work became specific as the person did.

This does not mean artists should begin imitating whatever is popular online. Television, games, gossip, cartoons, family photographs, cheap graphics, memes and embarrassing enthusiasms are all available to artists, as they should be, but the source still has to be transformed. Too much art borrows the appearance of whatever feels current without producing a form equal to it. Selecting the correct subject is different from seeing it freshly. A press release can contain every approved concern of the decade while the work beneath it sits on the floor doing nothing.

The professional system has also become preoccupied with signals. Gallery representation, prizes, institutional exhibitions and prominent placements gradually manufacture an appearance of inevitability. These signals may predict which artist is likely to succeed within the art world, but they tell us less about whether that artist has altered the culture beyond it.

Meanwhile, the audience has not ceased to be visually interested. People collect clothes, furniture, ceramics, records, trainers, books and design. They follow makers directly and encounter new work through channels that feel more open than a gallery. Contemporary art has lost people who still possess curiosity, appetite and money. They’ve found livelier invitations elsewhere.

The significance reaches beyond a bruised market. Contemporary art still offers a form of attention that the leading cultural platforms rarely encourage. An artwork can remain unresolved. It can contain incompatible ideas without converting them into a position. It asks for physical time and gives no automatic instruction about how the viewer should respond. This capacity has become more valuable as public culture has grown faster and more coercive. Platforms reward instant recognition, emotional certainty and repetition. They learn what keeps us looking, then supply more of it… Art can interrupt that process by making the familiar strange enough to be seen again.

When artists retreat from the centre of culture, industries with clearer commercial incentives take the space. Technology companies organise attention. Fashion companies manufacture identity. Political campaigns convert grievance into belonging. Influencers turn experience into inventory. None of them are obliged to keep the ambiguity or allow sustained thought... And this is why I would like contemporary artists nearer the front again. I don’t mean restoring an old hierarchy in which visual art sits above television, fashion or popular music. Nor do I mean manufacturing another gang of badly behaved art celebrities and waiting for the tabloids to notice.

Artists can regain cultural authority by making work that other fields need to catch up with. That requires attention to life beyond the art world’s internal debates, along with the confidence to not merely illustrate the news. It requires form, judgement, humour, risk and the possibility of failure. Relevance cannot be inserted afterwards with an essay.

Galleries and museums have a part to play. They can choose work with public consequence rather than work already carrying the correct professional signals. They can speak plainly, welcome people without patronising them and permit disagreement without turning it into another carefully managed conversation.

Collectors can participate too, by buying work before a consensus has formed – that is a commitment to an artist’s present practice rather than a bet on their future. It gives them time and independence. At its best, collecting allows difficult work to continue before the rest of culture has decided what to call it.

No medium owns the present permanently. Cultural leadership moves as technology, money and desire rearrange themselves. Contemporary art enjoyed an exceptional period near the centre and has since slipped behind faster and more available forms. This is not an insult to artists. It is a description of their present position, but I would like to walk into a gallery and encounter something that makes the rest of culture seem slightly late. That would be a useful place for art to begin again.

Rabbit holes

One song - Thompson Twins, Doctor! Doctor!. Watch the video as well as listening: hair and choreographed awkwardness, pop arriving as a complete exportable world.

One exhibition - Sensation, Royal Academy, 1997. Perhaps the last British exhibition to become a pub argument, tabloid scandal and national style at once.

One related Blackbird Rook post - The Collector’s Guide to Contemporary Art, Part One. If this essay asks who gets to define the present, the guide asks how a collector can recognise something before the professional signals have done the recognising for them.

One available work - Andi Magenheimer, The Trick is Blending, 2018. A woman studies herself in a mirror. The title catches self-fashioning, camouflage and the daily business of making an identity.

The first thing you see is the frog. She swims under the board in lime green, her plaited hair trailing behind her. Her body is transparent, like one of those glass frogs whose skin reveals the organs beneath. Inside her torso is a busy little anatomy of heart, stomach, tubes and sacs. Turquoise streams run past her towards the fins. Across the warm grain of the timber, the colours look almost indecently cheerful. Turn the board over and most of that activity disappears. The deck is bare wood apart from a small white plastic bag near the tail. Printed on it is a yellow face that recalls the acid-house smiley of the late 1980s, though its expression is less a grin than a queasy grimace. One side is crowded, bodily and unruly. The other gives us timber, balance and a bit of discarded street debris.

Christina Barrera’s I Could Devour the Whole World and Feel Good About It was the final board made in a series of five that I commissioned with James Otter through Blackbird Rook, and the patronage of the Tom and Chai Hall Collection. The other four artists were based in the UK. Barrera, a Colombian-American artist raised in South Florida and now living in New York, brought a different coastline and a different inheritance to the project… She also brought knowledge of surfing. Barrera understood that a surfboard has its own intelligence. It must float, turn, carry a body and survive being knocked about. Its curved form isn’t an eccentric canvas. It is the result of practical decisions made against water.

James Otter has been making wooden surfboards in Cornwall since 2008. His boards use a hollow skin-and-frame construction: thin sections of cedar and poplar are assembled around an internal wooden structure, shaped by hand, then finished with fibreglass and bio-based epoxy. The timber comes from regeneratively managed woodland in the South West. This isn’t wood applied as a luxury veneer. It is the material from which the board’s strength, weight and movement are built.

That distinction matters here because Barrera’s own work is deeply concerned with making. She moves between drawing, printmaking, weaving, sculpture and installation, treating craft as a carrier of knowledge rather than a decorative extra. Her figures draw on the visual languages of pre-colonial South and Central America, alongside the American vernacular of protest signs, cartoons, advertisements and public notices. She has described trying to imagine the artist she might have become had she been educated within an uncolonised South American tradition.

The frog had appeared before. Barrera made Ranita (Little Frog) in 2022, and frog-like figures later populated her drawings of processions, floods, fires and imagined liberated territories. They can look funny, which is useful camouflage. They march, adapt and endure. They are less mascots than survival devices… Here the frog has found an especially suitable body. Amphibious by nature, she occupies an object made to negotiate land and water. Her visible organs make survival feel physical rather than heroic. Nothing is sealed away. Digestion, circulation and appetite are all on display.

The title sharpens the image. Barrera has written of wanting to “devour” imperialist culture and pull it into the service of the artistic traditions denied to her. The board itself performs something similar. Surf culture has been remarkably efficient at selling freedom through bronzed bodies, empty beaches and expensive kit. Barrera puts a Colombian-American woman, or frog, into that fantasy and lets us see what she carries inside: ancestry, labour, appetite and the strain of remaining alive. The small plastic bag on the deck adds a scruffier aftertaste. Even paradise has litter.

Cornwall makes the collision richer. Otter’s workshop belongs to a place where surfing is part sport, part livelihood and part local theatre, complete with its own costumes and minor vanities. It is also a place with a stubborn tradition of making things properly by hand. Barrera’s South Florida surfing background, her Colombian family history, James Otter’s Cornish craftsmanship and the support of an international collection meet in one functional object. That was the point of bringing these worlds together. Patronage is most interesting when it enables a conjunction that would otherwise never occur, rather than merely buying the result after everyone else has agreed it is good.

The board can be hung on a wall and will probably be treated with greater care than most things designed to enter the Atlantic. Yet it remains capable of being surfed. That possibility saves it from becoming too grand. The frog may carry an entire nervous little world inside her, but she is still heading for the water.

For other work by Christina Barrera, visit Blackbird Rook on Artsy here.

And to view all five surfboards, download the preview here.

Artists can talk happily about failure. Failure is interesting: it suggests experimentation, courage and difficult decisions made in the studio. There are student essays, podcasts and conferences devoted to it. But trying is less good. Trying means following up and applying again, going to the opening and introducing yourself to someone who may not remember you, and sending a second message after the first received no answer. It can leave you standing beside the bucket of Moretti, wondering whether now is a good moment to mention the new work in your studio. Trying leaves fingerprints and the fantasy of an artistic career involves no hustling trace. The artist works, then someone important sees it and recognition follows… as though drawn towards quality by some natural force. Build it and they will come.

But almost nobody’s career works like that. Work moves around because people metaphorically carry it with them. Someone sees it in a crappy group show and mentions it six months later. A curator follows an artist online for three years before making contact. A dealer notices the same name several times and eventually becomes curious. An artist writes and applies and asks and reminds. From the outside, this can look suspiciously like ambition and the art world has never been comfortable with ambition when it’s visible. Artists are expected to possess enormous quantities of it, but to wear it invisibly. They must want a career without appearing careerist, seek attention without appearing needy and speak about their work without looking as though they are trying to persuade anyone. The effort needs to be made invisbly. No one wants to become the person advancing across an opening with a phone full of installation shots, trapping strangers with their pitch.

Conversely, artists also need periods in which the work is protected from explanation and the vulgar demands of circulation. Work can be damaged by being spoken about too early. And an artist can lose years making work that photographs clearly, fits the application box and produces an efficient paragraph of supporting text.

There is a real difference between helping work enter the world and making it fit where it’s not well received. I learnt something about that difference through fourteen large paintings bought by a great collector nearly two decades ago. They formed a single cycle, loosely structured like the Stations of the Cross, and were intended to surround the viewer in one room. I had imagined something like standing in a glade and turning to take in what was around you. When he bought them, two years before they were finally completed, the collector offered to make them the centrepiece of the inaugural exhibition of his new space.

The credit crunch delayed the opening and, by the time the project returned to life, a prestigious curator had been appointed. He had his own vision for the collection, and paintings, including mine, did not happily appear. This created an awkward obligation. The collector had promised me the room. The curator hadn’t made the promise and, in his new position, didn’t want to honour it. He may have felt he should. I certainly felt he should, which is how the emails began. They went back and forth. He came to my studio and a lack of enthusiasm seemed clear. The work wasn’t finished but the 14 large paintings didn’t fit with his plans.

I kept following up. The paintings moved from the inaugural exhibition to the second, then, I think, to the third. Eventually I stopped emailing. There was indignity in trying to push someone into showing work I knew he didn’t want to show. One or two paintings couldn’t be slipped in as the work required all fourteen and would fill the main room. I was effectively asking him to bend an entire exhibition programme around a promise made by somebody else.

I went to the first show in the new space. It was good and interesting, which was inconvenient. I could see his curatorial aesthetic and I could see there was no place in it for my work. To continue would have obliged both of us to perform an enthusiasm neither believed in. The fourteen paintings remain in the collection’s storage. As far as I know, nobody has ever seen them together in one room. As they were too big to see all together at the same time in my studio, I haven’t either.

Persistence is necessary, but it isn’t sacred. Sometimes the unanswered email is an invitation to try again. Sometimes a courteous exchange has already delivered the answer, if you are prepared to hear it.

The difficulty begins when embarrassment hardens into a principle: when the artist decides that asking is inherently grubby, that visibility contaminates seriousness or that any deliberate attempt to find an audience amounts to gaming the system. This can seem like integrity, but sometimes it’s just fear. If you don’t send the work, the rejection remains hypothetical. If you don’t invite anyone to the studio, you can continue believing that the right visitor would recognise everything immediately.

A studio visit is more exposing than an unanswered email. Someone stands in front of the thing itself. They look for longer than expected at the piece you had almost left out, then pass over the work you thought would settle the argument. They notice the wrong things. They bring their own interests, boredom, knowledge and bad mood, and they may understand something you hadn’t intended, or nothing at all. To be seen is not always to be admired - it is to lose control of sequence and emphasis, and to discover that other people don’t encounter the work as you might wish.

I used to tell students that careers are built through an accumulation of sightings. The first time someone sees your work, they may be mildly curious. The second time, they recognise it. By the third, they begin to think the repetition means something. This is not a romantic theory. It can involve standing beside your work in a draughty space with only four people at the opening, two of them related to the organiser. It can mean paying entry fees you resent and carrying work up stairs that are too narrow. There is no dignified way around it.

Most opportunities amount to very little. Even getting into a respected open exhibition may produce no sale, no review and no change in your visibility. The work is hung, looked at, taken down and returned in someone else’s packaging. Yet visibility can accumulate in ways that are difficult to measure. Someone has now seen the work. Perhaps they barely registered it. Perhaps they will remember it later, when another piece causes the first encounter to rearrange itself in their mind.

The internet has made the effort more exposed. It once disappeared into envelopes, studio visits, private conversations and applications sent by post. Now it can be counted. You can watch someone announce an exhibition, remind people about it, post photographs from it, thank everyone who came and then repost someone else’s photograph of having attended. By the end, even the artist may feel exhausted by their own enthusiasm. The common response is irony: a small apology attached to the post, a joke about the algorithm, an acknowledgement that promotion is embarrassing. The artist announces the event while pretending to stand at a slight distance from the person doing the announcing.

This is understandable, but it’s still a performance. A useful distinction may be between the willingness to place the work where it might encounter other people (and the involved persistence, correspondence, conversation and the occasional risk of looking foolish), and spectacle - which turns the artist’s effort into a continuous public drama in which every minor development becomes evidence of momentum. The first serves the work, the second can consume it.

There is nothing morally elevated about being overlooked, and visibility is no proof of quality either. Some people are extremely effective at being seen. They possess the stamina, confidence and social ease to remain in circulation while others retreat. Their success can be irritating, particularly when the work appears thinner than the machinery carrying it. But resentment doesn’t improve the neglected work. The art world is unfair, socially weighted, inconsistent and often stupid. Effort does not reliably produce recognition. Talent does not distribute itself according to access, money, charm or being good at admin… while careers often do. Part of becoming an artist is learning where effort is being converted into possibility and where it is merely being harvested. Some organisations survive by collecting artists’ hope in small entry-fee payments. Some networking events leave everyone feeling as though they have spent an evening exchanging business cards underwater.

I now encounter the same evasions from the other side, working as an art adviser. I take collectors into artists’ studios and watch them become underwhelmed. Nobody says, “I don’t like it”, although this would often be useful and would at least get us all home earlier. They say, “Let me think about it.” The artist hears a possibility. The collector believes they have made a tactful escape. I stand between them, translating a sentence neither wishes to translate for themselves.

Discernment is necessary, and so is the ability to tolerate embarrassment. Every artist who continues long enough becomes acquainted with the unanswered email, the studio visit that produces compliments and nothing else, and the person who says, “Let’s keep in touch”, with the calm finality of a closing door. None of it is pleasant, but it isn’t fatal. The greater danger is arranging your life so carefully around the avoidance of rejection that no one gets the chance to reject you, and the work remains safe, unmisunderstood and undiscovered… its potential preserved in perfect condition.

The people who last, surrender some of that dignity. They make the work, place it in circulation, endure the small social humiliations but learn when to stop pressing on a closed door.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of - Tracey Emin. In her 1993 White Cube show, My Major Retrospective 1963-1993, she made her wanting gloriously visible before the art world had agreed she mattered. Calling an early exhibition a major retrospective was either self-mythology or nerve; in her case it was both.

One film - Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy. Rupert Pupkin treats every refusal as a scheduling problem and every scrap of politeness as a promise. It is persistence carried past dignity, judgement and eventually the law.

One exhibition or historical reference - Gustave Courbet’s Pavilion of Realism, built at his own expense beside the 1855 Exposition Universelle after The Painter’s Studio was rejected. Courbet understood that sometimes you stop writing courteous letters and build the room yourself.

One related Blackbird Rook post - Outside the Studio: A Field Guide to Being an Artist Today. The present newsletter supplies the blush missing from the practical advice: the moment before sensible career strategy becomes an actual email sent to somebody who may ignore it.

One available work - Peggy Kouroumalos, Head On (The Door), 2015. The title catches the essay’s central judgement: deciding which doors deserve another knock and which one has already answered.

One unexpected tangent - sprezzatura, the Renaissance courtier’s art of making difficult things look effortless. The art world still demands this courtly trick: immense labour, ambition and admin, all worn as though you had just wandered into the right room.

There is nothing especially wrong with these paintings. They’re trying to do a job as interior decor. They soften a wall, absorb a bit of sound and announce that this is not an organisation devoted entirely to spreadsheets, but the mistake is believing that this is a considered cultural strategy. Buying some art is not the same thing as having a relationship with culture.

That relationship is surprisingly easy to recognise. If you walk into an organisation that has really thought about culture, there is often something slightly different about the people. Not everyone, of course. You’re not going to suddenly be surrounded by amateur art historians quoting John Berger by the bagel bar. It’s more subtle than that… There’s just a little more light behind the eyes. The people have opinions. They point at something on the wall and say, “I’ve never quite worked that one out.” Or they’ll tell you they didn’t like a piece when it first arrived but now find themselves looking at it every morning. Someone else disagrees. Somebody mentions an artist they saw at the weekend. None of these conversations are particularly profound, but that’s the point - the paintings have become part of the life of the place rather than part of the décor.

I’ve seen the opposite far more often. People hurry past the collection with exactly the same expression they’d wear for the emergency exit signs. The art has become wallpaper… expensive wallpaper, but still wallpaper. It announces only the fact that somebody, at some point, thought the office should contain art, but it says nothing about the organisation itself.

One of the nicest moments I’ve had came after installing work in an investment firm’s offices. We’d chosen a group of pieces by Brian Griffiths & Frank Kent, Louise Giovanelli and Willard Boepple. One member of staff had watched the whole process with polite scepticism. He wasn’t hostile, he simply couldn’t see why any of it mattered. A few months later I went back and noticed he’d changed desk. It now faced the Brian Griffiths and Frank Kent. I asked him why and he shrugged slightly. “Every time I look up from my screen,” he said, “it makes me feel a bit more at home.” That was it. No speech about creativity. No discussion of aesthetics. No claim that the company had become more innovative. He had simply discovered that some artworks repay living with.

People often reach for statistics here - studies suggesting art improves productivity, creativity or staff wellbeing by a measurable percentage. Some of those studies are interesting and many are probably true, but I’m not sure they’re the most interesting argument. If somebody spends eight hours a day in an office, shouldn’t the place contain things capable of rewarding that time? Shouldn’t there be something that isn’t merely functional? Shouldn’t an organisation occasionally make room for ideas that aren’t immediately required to justify themselves? Those questions seem more useful than whether quarterly performance improved by three per cent. Which is why I increasingly think collections are the least interesting part of cultural strategy. They’re the visible part, but the more profund thinking happens elsewhere.

Organisations ask me about buying art, but it’s almost never the first question I want to answer. I’m more interested in why they’re asking. Do they want to make the office more interesting? Do they want to help clients feel more at ease? Are they trying to support artists? Do they want to develop a distinctive identity? Or have they simply noticed that other successful firms seem to have paintings on the walls? Those are very different conversations.

The organisations that have done this well rarely begin with acquisition. UBS is a good example. Its relationship with Art Basel, its collection, its market research and its advisory work reinforce one another. The collection isn’t an isolated gesture. It sits within a much broader understanding of culture, collecting and client relationships. Hyundai’s long partnership with Tate works for a similar reason. The interesting thing isn’t that the company funds ambitious commissions. It’s that the relationship extends into research, scholarship and long-term commitment. The art isn’t being asked to behave like advertising. The collection is only one expression of a larger idea. That larger idea is what interests me.

If you’re a paid subscriber, then below I’ve shared the questions I find myself asking whenever I walk into an organisation. They’re the same questions that usually reveal whether a company has simply acquired art or has begun to think culturally.

Cover image: Jim Cheatle, Victor Vesala, 2024, C-Type print on Fuji Crystal Archive Maxima Matt, 63 × 51 cm with frame included, Editions 1-15 of 15 + 2AP

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When my children were small, I found it at my parents’ house and brought it home. The book felt bleached and dry, with the odd stain and biro doodle. I read it to my children, but it never struck the same chord. They preferred Hairy Maclary and The Story of the Little Mole Who Knew It Was None of His Business. The whimsical yak was competing with doggy capers and a mole with a turd on his head.

As I remember, in Yak and the Painted Cave, the yak leaves the village and finds a huge cave. He wants to decorate it. Not with a modest flourish, but properly, ambitiously. He does what you’re supposed to do and buys paint. He takes his favourite yellow umbrella and swaps it with a local merchant - as an aspiring artist, he parts with something precious to acquire the sanctioned means of making… he enters the economy of proper materials. He doesn’t begin as some wild innocent, he tries to do it right and then, of course… it isn’t enough. That is the point in the story that interests me most. The yak first tries legitimacy. He gets real paint, he buys the proper thing, he makes the exchange, but realises that these materials can’t stretch to the size of his ambition.

This feels to me like one of the least discussed truths about artists. I often talk as though the problem is just some kind of lack: lack of money, space, time, support, access or the right conditions. Those things are real, sometimes painfully so, but there is another difficulty… one that artists know well… even when one of those obstacles is removed, it still doesn’t solve the real problem. It refines it. The right materials don’t necessarily release the work you’ve been envisioning - they often just allow you to fail at a higher level of finish.

There is a whole fantasy structure built around the artist’s life which suggests that once the practical obstacles are removed, everything will flow. Once you have the better studio, the longer stretch of time, the uninterrupted week, the larger canvas, the proper table, the more supportive partner, the less exhausting day job, the better software, the right grant and good quality paint, then the work will begin properly. I have had better studios and long periods in which to make work, and sometimes the long stretch of time just becomes something else to fill.

The yak buys paint and then realises that the cave is bigger than the purchase. He looks around and discovers colour in the field, on his own hooves, stained by flowers. The pigments were already present… already in contact with him… already underfoot. The merchant wasn’t the sole gatekeeper after all. The world was bigger than the shop.

This discovery shifts the problem from scarcity to recognition. The question is no longer what can I get, but what have I failed to notice? What am I already standing in? What is already touching me, marking me, waiting to be converted into something? That’s a different and more unsettling idea. It removes one of the artist’s favourite alibis.

I’ve argued that constraints are good for creativity. This is true in the way many overused truths are true, so often repeated that they arrive dead on the page. I think something more specific is going on here. Scarcity, whether of time or materials, can hide how much of artistic life is built on the postponement fantasy: the belief that seriousness begins later, once we are properly equipped.

When I was a student, there were days when I would arrive after a late night, hungover or at least slightly worse for wear. There were small canvases, boards and offcuts to work on when I felt like that. Because there was less significance, I could make something without worrying about the result – my “hangover paintings”. Looking back, those were probably my favourite pieces. They were freer and less precious than most of the work I made when I was behaving properly.

The expensive surface carries its own demands… you know what it cost and how much of it remains unused. You tighten up. Also, when everything is possible, too much remains possible. The offcut has already been demoted, so there is less pressure - you can spoil it, cover it or discover that it wasn’t an offcut after all. Making from what is lying around cuts through the postponement fantasy. Of course old tea towels are not morally superior to linen, and scavenged matter is not automatically more authentic than bought paint - that sort of thing becomes silly very quickly. Improvised materials can harden into a contrived style as easily as anything else. There is no particular virtue in a scrap of cloth simply because of its scrappiness, but when an artist works with what is available because work must be made, taste and adapting to circumstances become visible together.

I remember a Wilhelm Sasnal show at Wilkinson Gallery years ago in which some of the paintings looked as though they had been made on old tablecloths or tea towels from a Mediterranean restaurant. What stayed with me was not just their appearance, but the feeling that they had fought their way into existence through whatever was to hand. What I saw wasn’t picturesque poverty or tasteful ruin. There was something powerful in the sense of a post-apocalyptic determination to create, without the usual sanctified materials of high art. Perhaps that is why work made from the near and the available can feel so charged. It carries a trace of refusal… it refuses the idea that creativity is a problem of materials and the seductive idea that to make something you have to set up perfect conditions. It says no to the impulse that translates every idea into a shopping list.

We live in a culture that is really good at turning desire into equipment. I’m surrounded by friends who personify “all the gear and no idea” – garages full of wind surfing equipment and expensive bikes. More paint, more kit, more storage, more software, more optimisation, more systems, more products for the person who may one day begin. It isn’t hard to see how we become tangled up in this. A lot of modern life trains us to behave like the consumers of our own aspirations. I have definitely bought things in the hope that they will dislodge the work – reed pens, a smartphone gimbal, Michael Harding paint. But it’s a mistake – you have to begin before the conditions flatter you.

This may be one reason the idea feels newly charged to me now. Making-do is clearly not a new idea, but overproduction looks more and more vulgar and stupid. Waste doesn’t carry the old glamour because there’s too much of it. And too much contemporary visual culture arrives frictionless and infinitely reproducible. There is no drag in it. No resistance. No sense that anything had to be wrestled with. Against that background, the image of someone making work from what survives, what is near, what remains and what can still bear a mark has a different dignity. It suggests the artist is someone not waiting to be provisioned into seriousness.

Maybe that’s the more idiosyncratic point, the one I think artists themselves often feel but don’t always say - to make from what is at hand is more than an aesthetic choice or an economic necessity. It can be a way of refusing the subtle bad faith of always preparing to begin. The work may be here, in the compromised present, in the half-dry felt tip, the old bedsheet, the battered board, the stained cloth, the paint that runs out too soon. The yak swaps the umbrella. He buys the paint. He does everything in the right order but still his vision is greater than the materials he can afford. So the story becomes a fable about recognition… the answer was local, ordinary and embarrassingly available. The field was loaded with colour all along.

It’s a consoling thought, but a demanding one too. The essential materials may not be elsewhere. The real work may not belong to the longed-for future in which everything is finally arranged, funded and free of inconvenience. It may begin with whatever has already marked you, with the stain already on your hoof.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of - Phyllida Barlow, who made enormous, swaggering sculptures from plywood, plaster, cement and whatever else could withstand the indignity.

One book - Donald Bisset’s Yak and the Painted Cave, 1971.

One exhibition or historical reference - Paul Housley, A Playground in the Factory, Yorkshire Artspace, 2023. An exhibition about the artist wrestling with the studio, making do and fighting the work into existence. Housley reuses, reworks and recycles; paint and ideas accumulate until neither a shortage of materials nor the absence of an idea is much of an alibi.

One related Blackbird Rook post - The Creative Mindset, May 2024. An earlier piece about keeping creativity alive when money and encouragement contract.

One available work - Paul Housley, Asleep in the Dream Factory, 2023, oil on canvas, 80 × 60 cm. The title catches the studio’s double life: workshop and dream machine, a place where labour piles up.

One unexpected tangent - Karl Duncker’s candle problem and ‘functional fixedness’, our habit of seeing an object only in its customary role. The yak’s breakthrough is the same one: paint stops being something bought in a tin and becomes anything capable of leaving a mark.

One Piece Worth Seeing

Hannah Murgatroyd, Whalebone, 2023-2025

I came to Hannah Murgatroyd through her drawings. I’ve always been drawn to painters who paint as though they’re still drawing, who allow the mark to remain instead of burying it beneath rendering. Whalebone is one of the clearest demonstrations of that instinct I’ve seen in her work.

The painting felt distinctive when I first saw it. On the right, a child sits, almost cartooned, holding a piece of lapis lazuli. Lapis was once ground to make ultramarine, and at its best, the pigment was worth more than gold. In European painting it was reserved largely for people who mattered… the Virgin’s robe, mostly… here, the child holds the expensive bit without ceremony, as though someone has handed her a stone from the garden.

The child had moved to the centre of Murgatroyd’s work by the time she painted Whalebone. This makes more sense once you know how the paintings came about. Motherhood gave her a subject, but led to the loss of her studio. Painting had to take place in whatever gaps her daughter’s day left open, while both her body and her sense of what painting might be needed rebuilding.

Murgatroyd has described her child figures as carrying imagination, time and resistance, three things that become rather less available once you have a child. The figure in Whalebone isn’t there to provide a convenient note of innocence or to send us looking for meaning in her expression. She is the person who inherits this accumulating mess. She is also the reason the painting gets made at all, in whatever hours remain.

Behind her, the pale rounded form resting on its side is a reference to Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse, the oval head with its eyes closed and its features almost absorbed back into the form. It’s an art historical muse, dormant perhaps, but still present.

Around the child and the borrowed head, the painting refuses to settle. Bodies, bones, water, plants and mineral forms accumulate without arranging themselves into a dependable space. An orange horizon crosses the middle of the canvas above a second band of activity nearer the foreground. The central mass turns in on itself. Smaller circular forms, pearls, coins and something like an eye keep the gaze moving.

I showed Whalebone last year for a month, and what struck me increasingly during that time was the work taking place at the edges of attention. Across the bottom third, almost any square inch could be isolated as a small abstract painting: loops, dragged marks and a scribble of white that resolves into nothing figurative when removed from the larger image.

These passages still belong to the painting as a whole - they hold their place among the accumulated objects and fragments, but they also work independently. It is easy to miss this if you look only at the complete composition. This is where the drawing becomes essential. A line catches on a figure, passes through it and continues into the landscape. Child, head and mineral form aren’t separate objects arranged against a background… they’re joined by the movement of the brush.

Some passages have been worked close to saturation, scraped back and returned to until the paint has the density of sediment. Others remain comparatively bare, giving the eye somewhere to rest before it meets the next concentration of marks. The painting is dense, but its density is controlled. There is a difference between a painting that contains a great deal and one that is simply crowded.

Whalebone is ambitious and exactingly made, and it takes time to unravel. After a month I was still noticing passages I hadn’t properly seen: a second hand, a small stroke of yellow carrying more of the composition than its size would suggest and the way the bouquet of bandages burst from the central figures back.

Paintings that disclose everything in the first ten seconds rarely improve with further acquaintance. I had Whalebone in front of me for a month and hadn’t finished looking.

A brief summer offer

Until midnight on Sunday 16th, I’m offering 20% off an annual paid subscription to Blackbird Rook.

Paid subscriptions include the monthly Collector’s Note, longer essays and practical guides for artists and collectors, as well as access to the full archive. They also support the time required to research and write the free pieces, including One Piece Worth Seeing.

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A friend recently asked me what I actually did, and that’s what a diary should answer. “I’m an art advisor” is accurate enough, but it explains very little. It suggests a neat professional life in which collectors ask for paintings and I find them. There is some of that, but it only accounts for a fraction of my day.

If I’m not visiting a studio, my mornings tend to begin around seven. I go downstairs, let the dogs out, make coffee and sometimes breakfast for someone… That sounds as though I regularly wake beside a stranger - I mean my wife or one of my children. If the house is still quiet, I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and begin with admin. I might answer emails, finish the text for a new exhibition, finesse a PDF for a collector or organise a zoom for later in the day. All fairly mundane.

Quite often, I begin with a firm intention - today I will upload that show to Artsy, and by the evening, the images remain exactly where they were because a dozen other things have competed successfully for my attention: an artist has asked for advice; a collector wants clarification about a work; an NDA needs to be redrafted for the fourth time; I spend an hour on the phone discussing a Richter; then reread the Plaster magazine article I had already finished and make three tiny changes that nobody, including the editor, would ever have noticed. I’ll spend too long changing the photograph on an artist’s biography, correcting the font in a PDF or making sure the images sit exactly as they should. This is particularly ridiculous when I already suspect that the artist will be difficult to sell and the presentation may produce no immediate interest at all, but I can’t bring myself to send it out looking shoddy.

The days are a flurry of competing activities, many of which a more commercially disciplined person might decide not to undertake. At the moment, I am involved in a patronage scheme for which four artists are developing proposals for projects they want to pursue. I am talking to artists whose work I think is intelligent, relevant and worth spending time with, while knowing that some of it will be difficult to sell. I am working with estates, thinking about exhibitions, publishing a book, preparing selections and looking at photographs of paintings that may or may not genuinely be available.

That is one part of the job. The rest is harder to describe. I spend a surprising amount of time advising artists. I talk to artists about prices, galleries, exhibitions, collectors, careers and the work itself. Younger artists, in particular, can arrive with prices that bear little relationship to the stage of their careers or the market for their work. Prices may rise quickly during a fashionable period and become almost impossible to lower afterwards. An artist needs to remain able to sell (when they are no longer fashionable) to the doctor, developer or lawyer who buys only two pieces a year but chooses them thoughtfully. A sustainable artistic career cannot depend on a brief rush of attention and a handful of collectors.

Advising an artist sometimes means saying that I believe in the work but can’t recommend it at the price being asked. It may mean admitting that a brilliant series will be difficult to place because the paintings are enormous, the medium is fragile or the subject is not appropriate for a family space. And good work has often been overlooked because it arrived at the wrong moment, belonged to an unfashionable generation or did not resemble the market’s current idea of what important art should look like. I work with several artists who received considerable attention ten, twenty or thirty years ago and have since slipped partly from view. With them, the conversation is often about recontextualising the work. We can look again, identify what remains powerful, assemble a coherent selection and introduce it to collectors who are not simply trying to buy the person everyone else discovered last Thursday. There is excellent work sitting in studios and stores that has not become less excellent simply because fashion has turned elsewhere.

When I visit a studio, my preference is that they show me everything: the current work, the older work, the things stacked against the wall, the painting they are unsure about and the piece they had not imagined I would want to see. I would much rather make the selection myself than receive six images the artist has chosen as the official version of the practice. I can then put together what I think is the strongest and most coherent presentation for the collectors I work with. Nine times out of ten, the artist appreciates the selection.

When I first visited Marilyn Hallam, I had seen some fairly recent paintings in a group exhibition, but when I was in the studio, it was the work from the 1990s and early 2000s that blew me away. It was the art-world cliché made real: walking into a studio and discovering a lifetime of extraordinary work that had been allowed to recede from view. Those earlier paintings did not look dated or like material requiring a dutiful historical reassessment - they looked vivid, intelligent and entirely present.

With Justin Mortimer, the situation was different. I have known Justin for decades, from the period when his studio was above mine, and I have watched the work move through many stages. When, a couple of years ago, I saw his new works on paper, sketches and collages, they didn’t feel like peripheral studies for the paintings - they felt like the engine room of the practice, where the imagery and anxieties were being taken apart and reassembled. I asked immediately whether I could do something with them, which I am happily doing now – Material Witness.

Selection is not an administrative stage between studio and collector - it is part of the advice. I am choosing what I believe deserves attention, how it should be grouped and the context in which another person might be able to see it properly. This brings me to what I am actually paid for.

I have spent thousands of hours looking at art, studying markets and working with collectors, but the hours that matter more are the ones I spent making art, and the ones I spent teaching on degree courses. That is where I developed an understanding of what it means to make something that is visceral rather than theoretical. When I look at a work, I bring whatever art-historical, conceptual and intellectual knowledge I possess, but I also have an instinctive sense of what it took to produce the thing. I know the time in the studio, the failed passages, the frustration, the false confidence and the point at which an artist may have stopped one decision before the work became mannered. I know the difference between a painting that has genuinely found something and one that competently repeats an earlier discovery. Auction-room knowledge, prices and provenance all have their uses, but they are not the same as having lived through the making of work. Nor is an art-business course a substitute for twenty-five years spent in the studio.

There is an extraordinary amount of poor work in the art world, much of it offered with great conviction by charlatans and people with just enough knowledge to be dangerous. There is also just too much to look at… degree shows, galleries, art fairs, online platforms, auction catalogues and endless emailed PDFs produce an avalanche of work in front of anyone trying to make a sensible choice. A collector can come to me, give me an indication of what they are looking for and I will show them only good things. I will also show them good things they did not know they were looking for. I produce bespoke selections in response to particular tastes or spaces, but I will also send collectors some of what I have been showing more widely. A collector may ask for black-and-white hard-edge abstraction or garden sculpture, and I will respond to that brief, but I will also leave a door open for the work that does not fit the description but might be the thing they remember.

When I could not find an existing garden sculpture that I thought was both strong and affordable, I went to artists and asked them to develop proposals. The job was not simply to locate an outdoor object of the right size, it was to find, or help bring into existence, something I would be happy to see the collector living with.

The best collector relationships are responsive and curious. Someone doesn’t have to buy constantly or decide within an afternoon. One person may buy only one or two works a year but always replies, which I greatly appreciate. Others are actively building and want to consider everything. I particularly enjoy being told that a collector and their partner sat down together, cast the PDF onto the television and discussed each work. That is precisely what I hope will happen. They do not need to agree with me, but they should want to look.

Over time, the pace of buying may slow, but trust grows. Collectors have lived with the work and know whether the advice has held. We have occasionally sold things because circumstances required it, but nobody has yet asked me to sell a work because they stopped liking it. That seems a reasonable measure of success.

Buying in depth also has a direct effect on the artist’s life. Every time I sell a work from a studio, the artist can pay some rent, buy materials or gain another period in which to make art. I have sold ten or twenty works for some artists, and I know that it enabled them to keep their studios. Then you see what follows - they produce the next body of work, secure another exhibition and find gallery representation. A serious collector’s early commitment can alter an artist’s sense of what is possible at a point when confidence is still fragile. I increasingly think that the central purpose of Blackbird Rook is to help good artists keep working.

The estate work belongs to the same kind of activity. It can be labour-intensive and the immediate financial return may be moderate, but that is a bargain I make knowingly and usually with pleasure. You enter a studio or archive containing an entire life’s work and begin trying to understand what is there. There may be paintings, drawings, photographs, exhibition records, rights, old film formats, storage questions and competing family memories. Somewhere inside all of this is the question of how the artist wanted to be understood. The alternative to doing the work properly is that significant art becomes dispersed, mislabelled, simplified or lost.

And the writing… A more efficient Blackbird Rook might look more like an ordinary advisory. It would identify saleable stock, send it to likely buyers and spend less time thinking about everything around it. It might also lose the reason anybody should choose it over an ordinary advisory. The writing presents the clearest version of this tension. It began as a form of marketing and has become one of the most significant parts of my working week, perhaps more significant than it really should be.

I write partly for myself and partly for my colleagues and contemporaries as artists. I justify this by saying that collectors benefit from hearing what artists think about, what they struggle with and what it means to sustain a practice. Understanding art should involve some understanding of the conditions from which it emerges. But I also write because I want collecting to feel less remote. Buying contemporary art is not inherently weird, elite or intellectually forbidding. It should be a normal part of cultural life, just as caring about music or food is. Having music you love is better than owning one of those 40 Moody Love Songs compilation CDs and deciding that the matter has been dealt with - I realise that reference dates me, but the point remains. Britain has a particular discomfort with artiness and intellectual enthusiasm. Reading a broadsheet newspaper can be enough to get somebody called professor. Caring openly about paintings risks appearing ‘poncy’. We are good at making people feel self-conscious about taking culture seriously, but I would like to make the invitation wider. Everyone should engage with art, argue about it, buy it and have an opinion about what belongs in their home.

A more commercially disciplined version of me would probably stop writing these newsletters. He would spend less time thinking about democratising collecting, patronage and cultural policy. He would not propose podcasts, publish books or spend so long preparing beautiful presentations for artists he suspects will be difficult to sell. He would concentrate on the work most likely to produce immediate income. There are days when I think he might get considerably more uploaded to Artsy.

The difficulty is that I know I shouldn’t give up championing artists whose work I think is exceptional, and making the case for paintings that I believe should be on people’s walls… or for artists whose work collectors would love if only they encountered it properly. That is not an act of charity or altruism, it’s the basis of my judgement and the reason the business has the character it does.

At the end of a good working day, I like to have completed something. Finishing a piece of writing I am proud of is satisfying. So is completing a sale, paying the artist their share and making my own bank balance look a little healthier. The two outcomes are not enemies, although I sometimes organise my time as though they were.

So perhaps I should simply say it again. Do you want to buy some contemporary art? I can help.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of: Moyra Davey. Her photographs, films and writing grow from books, domestic objects, correspondence and daily repetition. She folds and posts some photographs before exhibiting them… an artist after my own kitchen table, although she has had the wit to turn the admin into art.

One film - The Price of Everything, Nathaniel Kahn’s 2018 film about artists, collectors and the gap between price and value. The most interesting figure is Larry Poons, who abandoned the work that made him fashionable but kept painting whilst the market looked elsewhere. Fashion eventually turned back towards him.

One exhibition: What Remains of the Day, which placed Marilyn Hallam, born in 1947, in conversation with Ellie MacGarry, born in 1991. Their paintings shared interiors, bodies, fabric and light.

One related Blackbird Rook post: Reassessing Marilyn Hallam: A Hidden Luminary in Contemporary Art. An earlier case for Hallam’s sustained practice and the issue with confusing reduced visibility with reduced achievement.

One available work: Clyde Hopkins, Chaunticlere, 1989, oil on canvas, 183 × 170 cm. A large, striking painting carrying the nervous energy of Thatcher’s Britain. At nearly six feet tall, it is both immersive and performative.

One unexpected tangent:John Peel understood trusted selection. Listeners tuned in because he might play something peculiar or abrasive and make them want to hear it again. A good adviser also risks somebody else’s attention on the thing they did not ask for.

A brief summer offer

This week’s newsletter looks at what I do as an art advisor, and questions the time I spend writing. In order to help justify that time, for the next seven days, I’m offering 20% off an annual paid subscription to Blackbird Rook on Substack.

Paid subscriptions include the monthly Collector’s Note, longer essays and practical guides for artists and collectors, as well as access to the full archive... and they support the time required to research and write the free pieces.

The offer ends at midnight on Sunday 16 August.

SUMMER SUBSCRIBER OFFER

I found an old Rightmove listing for the house and looked at the floor plan. There was not a single wall in the house that you could hang the painting on. Of course, that didn’t prove that the buyer was fraudulent - people buy work for second homes, offices, storage or walls they haven’t yet acquired, but still, it was odd, and odd enough to justify a little more investigation.

I asked for their passport as I also needed to complete anti-money-laundering checks, and, through the AML software I use, I could see that two other dealers had also checked the same person in the last few days. I contacted them, and between us we established that the potential collector was a scammer before anybody was defrauded. We were saved by a useful combination of art advising, property knowledge, local geography and nosiness. It was an unusual case, but it illustrates something fundamental about the job. Before recommending an artwork, an adviser has to establish not only that the work is good, but that the price, the seller, the circumstances and sometimes even the proposed buyer make sense.

People tend to imagine that art advising begins and ends with taste. They imagine that I see an artwork, decide whether it is good and then recommend it to a collector. Taste is certainly involved, but it’s only one part of a much longer process. Before I show someone a painting, I’ve usually made several different judgements. Is it one of the better works by the artist? Is the price justifiable? Does the owner actually want to sell? (Surprisingly I’m often offered work which isn’t really for sale.) And would the collector actually want live with it, rather than just admiring it on a screen?

Some of these questions are more engaging than others, but the first is still the most important. Is the work any good? Most artists don’t make their best work every time. They may produce an exceptional group of paintings, then spend several years making decent versions of the same discovery. Or another artist may have an uneven career in which one particular period contains almost everything that is genuinely interesting. The market isn’t very good at acknowledging this - it prefers names, dates, sizes, exhibition histories and a tidy story. These things can be measured. The difference between a painting that is a great work, and one that just looks like the artist’s better work is more difficult to judge.

That is where experience enters. I have spent more than twenty-five years as an artist, along with many years teaching other artists. When I look at a work, I bring whatever art-historical and conceptual understanding I possess, but I also have a visceral sense of what it took to make the thing. I know something about the decisions inside it, the failed passages, the point at which the artist stopped and the possibility that they stopped one decision too soon or one decision too late. I can usually tell when a work has discovered something and when it is repeating a discovery already made elsewhere. This does not make judgement infallible, nothing does, but it does mean that I am not simply comparing the work with last season’s auction prices or the current list of sought after names.

The next question is price. A good work can still be a bad recommendation if the price attached to it is ridiculous. For a few years I have worked with an older artist who sold well in Europe during the 80s and 90s. Understandably, he has a clear idea of what his work should sell for… an expectation that matches what he was achieving then. The difficulty is that I know the prices he wants are at least twice what the present market will support for his work and his biography. When I met him he hadn’t been selling for twenty years, so there were no price expectations from current collectors that meant he couldn’t be seen to lower his prices, but nonetheless, he didn’t want to move them, so I told him that although I would respect the figures he insisted I put on the paintings, I could not recommend them directly to the collectors I worked with. I really liked the work, but I couldn’t justify the prices. I offered to share the paintings more generally, and, so far, nothing has sold. It’s a real shame, because I would love to push the work properly.

Believing in an artist does not require pretending that every decision made around the work is sensible, and selling art is not simply a matter of persuading somebody to buy it. I don’t want to persuade a collector to acquire something I don’t believe in, and I don’t want to recommend good work at a price I cannot defend.

Quality and price are the questions most collectors expect an adviser to consider. After that, the questions become considerably stranger.

Read more

So forgive me if I delve into that world again, but I was thinking last week about why I always worked better when I shared a studio. The other person didn’t have to be doing anything useful, or even be there at the same time as me. It was enough to know they might come in later. They might unlock the door in the afternoon, carrying a coffee, and see whatever I had been doing all morning.

The studio I rented the longest was just off Vyner Street, when the coolest galleries were setting up there. It was a beautiful room, about 400 square feet, with high ceilings and a whole wall of windows overlooking the canal. There was even a pub downstairs. At the back was a darker space that I sublet, so at one point three of us shared it.

That third person was a young woman who moved in, got a very good job the next day and then disappeared until she moved out about a year and a half later. In one respect she was the ideal studio partner. She paid a third of the rent and never took up space, but her absence wasn’t what I needed. The useful studio partner was more of a presence than that.

It wasn’t about competition – although maybe it was about ambition. Most of the artists I shared with made work sufficiently different from mine to make any comparison irrelevant. Nor did I need someone wandering over every half-hour to offer a critique. It was just that their possible arrival changed the day.

When I knew I would remain alone, I could work in a way that appeared industrious without being really useful. I printed test ideas and worked back into them. I prepared surfaces, added thin scumbled washes of slightly different colours to a dozen canvases and built up grounds with thick thixotropic oil primer. I primed, sanded, stretched and moved things around from one wall to another. None of this was unimportant. Preparation is part of painting and looking is part of painting - testing something may be the most important thing an artist does all week. The difficulty is that almost anything in the studio can be made to look like part of the work if you want it to. The same thing can be experiment on Monday and clearly avoidance by Friday. From the outside they probably look identical.

At one point I’d developed an incredibly satisfying oil-based surface, but then I worried that it was too slick and that I was making things easy for myself, so I began making different grounds, trying to preserve a ‘cinematic’ surface whilst adding difficulties. This was a legitimate artistic problem, but it was also an elegant way to postpone painting. During gaps between studio partners, I could spend weeks testing things without producing much that felt worthy of leaving the room. I would go home tired, paint on my hands and turps on my clothes, satisfied that I had worked hard, but somewhere, at the back of my mind, I knew I had kept the work warm rather than moved it forward.

A painting doesn’t mind if you spend another day preparing the ground. It will let you potter happily around it. You can clean the brushes, mix the purple, clean the edge of a stretcher and decide that tomorrow, with better light, the real work can begin. Left to itself, the studio can become a very persuasive machine for delay. After one long period of working alone, I found I had trawled through hundreds of photographs that might serve as source material, and eventually made a huge painting of a friend called Janet. After two days of painting, I stood in front of it and almost burst into tears, unable to believe I had spent so much time on something so pointless.

Looking at a photograph of it now, I think it was probably all right. My feeling wasn’t necessarily an accurate judgement of the painting. I’d worked for weeks without anybody to bounce off, until effort and value had become impossible to separate.

Another person interferes with that confusion. They don’t need to ask what the hell you’re doing… my studio partners were all too intelligent, kind or preoccupied with their own work for that, but their presence made the studio just a little public. It asked, without asking, what there was to see.

That doesn’t mean every day must end with a finished painting. Some of the most serious studio days leave no visible result - a colour is ruled out, a surface is understood or an idea that had seemed clever is allowed to die. The work cannot always know where it’s going. If another person’s presence makes you rush towards something presentable, you’ve chosen the wrong person to share with.

I was fortunate in mine. I first shared with J. A. Nicholls, a good friend from Chelsea - we were both mature students and they tend to band together. If a gallerist was visiting, she’d tell me to put some of my work up too. You don’t always find that generosity among artists. Then there was James Scott Brooks. He was good company and might spend the day pricking holes into a sheet of paper, making work quite unlike mine. He later wrote about my work and I really valued what he thought. Juan Bolivar, whom I knew from my MA, made a kind of hard-edged figuration. He was enterprising, thoughtful and forthright. You worried about Juan’s opinion. That was useful too. His music was more questionable.

They worked hard, made serious work and were generous with their contacts and time. They offered feedback when asked and didn’t come over to explain your painting to you while it was still wet. The useful witness knows when to remain just a person eating crisps six feet away.

I used to be told that after a BA you could look at other people’s work and know what was going on. But after an MA you could look at your own work and know what was going on. This was after the MA. I usually knew when I was doing something uninteresting, or when preparation had become procrastination, and my studio partners didn’t need to expose it, I just needed to know they could see it too. In their company I judged my own work a little sooner, before three days of experimenting turned into three weeks of avoiding the thing in front of me.

There is a danger in that, because being watched can damage work as easily as it can sharpen your thinking. The problem is often timing. There are stages when a painting has become much worse and hasn’t yet found its way towards better… when an idea has been half-abandoned and its replacement is still really embarrassing. If somebody asks what you’re doing at that point, you may find yourself defending a decision that was never meant to survive the afternoon. Once you’ve explained it, you can become perversely loyal to the explanation.

The wrong studio partner turns the studio into a small gallery. The work starts performing before it has discovered what it is. Each failure feels witnessed and every temporary decision invites a discussion. The right person allows the work to remain unpresentable. They can see it without requiring it to be ready.

There was also the ordinary loneliness of the studio – for some months when I wasn’t sharing, I also lived alone… and you can’t really go home and have a conversation with Dot Cotton - she has her own EastEnders plot to play out. Once, after working alone for several days, I caught myself having a long, mundane conversation with a newsagent about his milk delivery. He gave me a confused look. Not frightened exactly, but close enough for me to realise that I hadn’t spoken to anyone for a couple of days and was clearly desperate for conversation. The presence of other artists stops the studio becoming too oppressive. Alone, every decision can acquire enormous significance. Should the blue be colder? Is this banal? Should I make another test? In a shared studio, those thoughts have to coexist with a kettle, bad music and somebody eating a yoghurt. Art needs intensity, but it also needs its dignity interrupted.

That’s what I miss about shared studios, rather than the romance of them. They can be cold, cramped, expensive and badly lit, with unspoken arguments about wall space and whose mug that is, but though the work is still allowed to fail there, it just isn’t sealed inside the artist’s private account of how hard they’ve worked.

My studio is at home now and I get into it less often than I’d like. A couple of cats live in it. They occasionally eviscerate a mouse and fling its entrails up one of my paintings. I’m not sure they’ve improved anything and they certainly don’t critique the work, so at some point I’d like to share again with an artist I trust. I don’t need them to tell me what to do, or force each day to end with a finished thing, I just need someone who can let the work remain unresolved and occasionally bad, without allowing me to disappear entirely into the process of making it. Someone might come in later… that was often enough.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of - Alberto Giacometti worked in a cramped Paris studio with his brother Diego next door as assistant, model and technical expert. Diego’s nearness allowed Alberto to keep looking at the same head without ever quite finishing with it.

One film - Kelly Reichardt’s film Showing Up follows a sculptor preparing an exhibition while other artists, family dramas and domestic failures keep getting into the room. It understands that an artist’s life is shaped as much by a broken boiler and an injured pigeon as by the work itself.

One exhibition or historical reference - Artist Support Pledge began in March 2020 with artists offering work for £200 or less and, after making £1,000 in sales, spending £200 on another artist’s work. It made generosity practical, with artists becoming one another’s customers and proof that somebody was looking.

One related Blackbird Rook post - Read this alongside Inside the Studio: What’s Really Going On?,published on 7 October 2025. The earlier piece opens the studio door for collectors; this one stays there long enough to notice how another artist’s possible arrival changes the work.

One available work - Juan Bolivar’s Stupid Dog, 2006, is an early work, made before Geometry Wars brought the tension between geometric abstraction and figuration into sharper focus. Almost two metres high, it already contains the deadpan humour and collision of high modernism with something deliberately daft that have remained central to his painting.

One unexpected tangent - A famous social-facilitation experiment claimed that cockroaches ran a simple route faster before an audience but struggled with a maze, although a later replication complicated the finding. The science is unsettled, but the image is perfect: company helps when you know the route and becomes a nuisance when you’re still finding it.

This month’s Collector’s Note brings together four such works. Gabriella Day has recently completed her MFA at the Slade and makes paintings whose awkwardness is part of their intelligence. Kate Burling turns fruit, flesh and landscape into forms that seem to melt into one another. Thomas Hylander gives a small domestic object the visual confusion of a minor catastrophe. Samantha Cary stages an elaborate two-part drama of sex, fantasy and grievance against a green brick wall.

The works range from £2,000 to £18,000. That is a broad financial span, although the prices are less interesting than the different kinds of appetite involved. Day’s painting is large, raw and comically resistant to good manners. Burling’s is compact and seductive. Hylander’s rewards the sort of slow looking that reveals how unreliable the first glance can be. Cary’s diptych has the scale and narrative abundance to dominate a room.

What connects them is a distrust of things staying in their appointed category. A chair starts behaving like a limb. Hills become folded fabric. A mirror swallows the room around it. A kitchen becomes a Western, a boudoir and a private reckoning. Each artist lets the image misbehave a little. That is usually where the life gets in.

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I’m posting an extra newsletter about this now because what Steven Allbutt, the director of StudionAme and co-director of the Florence Trust, is doing deserves a hearing. I have rarely met anyone so generous with their labour as Steve and his partner Yuka. He doesn’t simply argue that artists need better conditions, he finds neglected buildings, pursues their owners, negotiates the occupation, clears the rubbish, raises walls, sorts out the wiring and makes the places function. Much of this is exhausting, unglamorous work undertaken so that somebody else can have enough room to make something.

Last year I saw the result for myself when I rented the Florence Trust gallery at Holy Trinity in Cloudesley Square for An Unbidden Quest, Hannah Murgatroyd’s first London solo exhibition. It was a superb space: generous, characterful and large enough for the work to breathe. The building didn’t merely contain the exhibition. It gave the paintings room to establish themselves and allowed visitors to spend time with them.

A few days ago I visited Steven at a new Florence Trust project in Britannia Row, Islington. The building formed part of the former Pink Floyd recording and production complex. It has cultural history in its walls, although nobody appeared to be making much fuss about it. Artists were working while another temporary ecosystem was being assembled around them.

Steven and I talked about studios, art schools, property and the increasingly difficult business of trying to remain both an artist and a functioning adult in London. Afterwards, he sent me a longer written account of the situation. The quotations that follow come from that text.

His argument begins with a blunt question: ‘Artists are always the last to be paid, always the first to work, and an entire industry is built on the content they create. So where’s the value in return? Well, there isn’t any.’

Artists once occupied buildings that the conventional economy had abandoned. The leaking factory, redundant school and deconsecrated church were cheap because nobody else knew what to do with them. Artists supplied labour, heat and human presence. They cleaned the lavatories, patched the roof, built walls, brought in friends and made the dangerous bit of town seem interesting. Then came the coffee, the small plates and the estate agent’s photographer. This is a well-known story. The artists performed the regeneration and were rewarded with notice to leave.

Steven sees artists as being trapped between two industries that have discovered how much can be extracted from them. On one side is education. On the other is property. Both sell access to the conditions under which art might be made. Neither has much financial interest in whether it is made at all.

‘The things artists need most,’ he says, ‘have been supercharged and capitalised more than anything else: time and space.’

Time is the less visible loss. The question is no longer simply whether an artist can afford a room. It is whether they can afford the hours inside it after earning the money to pay for it.

‘Most people now struggle just to exchange time for enough money to survive long enough to exchange more time for more money. How can anyone make art at this time?’

As I’ve discussed at length in recent weeks, a practice that can be sustained at twenty-five through poor housing, casual work and heroic quantities of nervous energy becomes harder at forty-five. This is one reason the art world’s fixation on youth is so damaging. Steven argues that galleries and colleges increasingly package artists fresh from BA and MA courses as unusually clear-sighted interpreters of the present. Experience, craft and the slow development of judgement are treated almost as liabilities. Youth is easier to market and frequently easier to control.

Meanwhile, older artists are expected to maintain a practice while performing the ordinary work of being adults. Many do. They make paintings between teaching days, care visits and freelance jobs, then arrive at an opening looking as though none of this has happened. The performance of effortless commitment is another form of unpaid labour.

Steven returned to London in 2008. After a Florence Trust residency at St Saviour’s Church in Highbury, he found space in Hackney Wick while the Olympic site was still being built. His share of a 300-square-foot studio should have cost £150 a month. The arrangement was more improvised than that: he wasn’t paying rent to a friend who wasn’t paying rent and was nevertheless subletting to him. This was once a recognisable rung on the artistic ladder.

He later helped establish Tottenham Hale International Studios. A three-year lease became ten years, giving the organisation enough security to build something more substantial. According to Steven, a £12,000 Arts Council grant for a mezzanine helped generate £120,000 in additional revenue, returned to the project and its community.

The crucial ingredient wasn’t entrepreneurial genius. It was a lease long enough for effort to accumulate.

From 2012, London property became an international asset class and every battered depot acquired a speculative future. Steven remembers going from begging artists to take studios in Tottenham in 2010 to having them knock down the door two years later. By 2016, he could find nothing workable in London below £20 per square foot per annum before bills, rates, service charges and the cost of space artists couldn’t use. He drew a one-hour circle around the capital and eventually found buildings in Leicester.

London has since developed another absurdity. Brexit, Covid and working from home have left large amounts of commercial property empty. Artists are being invited back, usually on ‘meanwhile’ leases that can end just as a community begins to function.

‘Artists have been called back to the capital to help save it,’ Steven says, ‘but what they are really being asked to save is private equity’s property position.’

The language surrounding these arrangements is generous. In practice, artists may be paying commercial rents to keep an investor’s asset occupied while its owner waits for the market to improve. Steven has seen temporary studios offered at around £24 per square foot per annum, with longer-term space reaching £30 plus bills.

Some of it is on an industrial estate near Wembley ‘where no kombucha-drinking curator is ever going to set foot’.

That line contains a fair amount of truth. Steven describes an internationally established artist working in a Grade II-listed church in Dollis Hill. Curators from the Serpentine declined a studio visit. When they heard he was moving to another listed church near Regent’s Park, they announced that they would be delighted to come. The distance was a few miles. Socially, it was closer to crossing the Urals.

Steven’s criticism isn’t reserved for landlords. He believes many existing studio organisations have adopted the same property logic they were created to resist. They secure temporary or subsidised buildings, divide them into studios and charge artists rents described as affordable. The difference between what the organisation pays and what the artists pay then supports an expanding institutional structure.

Buildings do have costs. Somebody must negotiate leases, maintain fire systems, arrange insurance, handle accounts and answer the telephone when water begins coming through a ceiling. Useful work should be paid properly. The question is how quickly practical administration becomes an organisation whose principal achievement is sustaining itself.

‘You see the creation of boards, facilities teams, HR staff, programme directors, curatorial teams, administrators and CEOs,’ Steven writes, ‘all wanting salaries in exchange for adding little to no value and certainly not making any art.’

That judgement is severe and won’t apply equally to every provider. Many people working for studio charities are poorly paid and deeply committed. Yet Steven’s central question survives the generalisation: who is the structure ultimately serving?

If artists are charged high rents so that an organisation can support a hierarchy of salaried positions, the artist has become its customer rather than its beneficiary. The studio provider may be incorporated as a charity and produce an excellent impact report, but the artist is still supplying the revenue. Affordability becomes a comparative claim rather than a meaningful one. The rent is considered affordable because another organisation charges even more.

Art education feeds the same machine. London’s colleges sell proximity to an art world that is itself being pushed out of London. MA fees rise while working space shrinks and teaching becomes more precarious. International recruitment helps keep financially unstable institutions alive.

Steven talks about students ‘sold a dream at a nightmare price’ and courses reluctant to fail disengaged students because doing so might deter the next fee-paying intake. He has encountered an internationally funded resident who rarely appeared at the studio or produced work, preferring institutional dinners where the right shoulders might be rubbed.

There are generalisations here. International students aren’t a single class of wealthy opportunists. Many make considerable financial and personal sacrifices to study in Britain, work extremely hard and are exploited by precisely the system Steven describes. Home students can be idle, rich and strategically sociable too. The British art world achieved inherited advantage long before overseas fees arrived.

Still, there is truth beneath the provocation. When education, time and space depend upon family wealth, the field narrows. Steven’s description is brutal: culture becomes dominated by ‘young, beautiful people with perfect teeth and clean, well-pressed wardrobes’, making work for others whose lives are similarly insulated. I know enough artists to resist the caricature. I also see enough Instagram to recognise the wardrobe.

Britannia Row is Steven’s attempt to demonstrate another model. The Florence Trust was initially given four weeks to prepare 30,000 square feet for a short-term occupation, since extended. Steven says the team spent £40,000 panelling floors, constructing walls, rewiring, plumbing, lighting, installing alarms and sealing the building. Commercial contractors had estimated the work at about £250,000.

The studios were offered at £5 per square foot per annum. At that rate, an artist could take 1,000 square feet for roughly the price charged elsewhere for 200.

This wasn’t achieved by pretending buildings cost nothing. The rents finance the occupation while helping to support project space, a writers’ room and an exhibition programme. When work needs doing, artists in the building do it and are paid from the value the building generates. The structure remains light because its purpose is to support activity rather than manufacture administration.

At Britannia Row, artists can spread out, fail at full size and leave things unresolved. Councillors, planners and developers can see how quickly an empty property becomes useful when the people occupying it are trusted to get on with the job.

Affordable space isn’t merely a concession to artists, like cheap coffee in the staff canteen. It is part of the machinery through which culture is produced. Give an artist a rabbit hutch for six expensive months and you will get work adapted to a rabbit hutch. Give them time, scale and some security and the result becomes less predictable. Less predictable is usually where good art begins.

Steven puts it directly: ‘We all want better art, but until we treat artists better and stop seeing them as another revenue stream, that won’t happen. The things artists most need, time and space, are the things the world is no longer willing to give them.’

That is why I wanted to share this conversation. Some readers will recognise his argument immediately. Others will find parts contentious. Steven would, I suspect, prefer an argument to polite silence.

There is an opportunity this week to see Britannia Row and have that conversation in person.

The Florence Trust’s A.I.R. 25/26 Summer Show includes work by Ali Farrall, Ameya Vishweshwar, Eri Ueno, Ewan Mungo White, Jane Kim, Jorge Cantú, Louise Benton, Masaki Ishikawa, Melina Merlín and Pádraig Mac Cana. It is also a rare chance to walk through much of the building while it is occupied by artists.

The exhibition is open from 1pm to 6pm on Tuesday 28, Wednesday 29 and Thursday 30 July, then Saturday 1 August. It is closed on Friday 31 July.

Florence Trust 35A Britannia Row London N1 8QH

Further information

StudionAme

The Florence Trust

Steven Allbutt

There’s a heart-breaking moment in the book which made me realise just how unusually he encounters the world. I’m always fascinated by the description of other people’s experience when it feels fundamentally different, or extreme. The moment is where he describes how alcohol appears to him in the world… not just as drink or a temptation, but as all encompassing. A billboard for Guinness, a sign outside a pub, some small piece of commercial seduction… most people would barely register it, but for Robins, the world reorganises itself around that image. It addresses him directly and demands his full attention.

That really struck me. An ordinary piece of public imagery becomes intensely private. For one person it is just background, but for another it’s all-consuming. There’s a term for this in addiction studies: cue reactivity. Certain cues, once attached to a substance, stop being neutral. They activate memory, appetite, anticipation, bodily response. An advert is not just an advert. A glass is not just a glass. The thing out there has acquired a charge in here.

This is easy to understand in the abstract and much harder to grasp imaginatively. Most of us can be sympathetic to addiction without quite grasping the extent to which the addict lives in a more dangerous world. It isn’t only that the person wants the thing too much. The thing is everywhere. On buses, in jokes, in kitchens, in marriages, in boredom, in celebration. The world keeps offering itself back in the form of the thing that might ruin you.

I don’t want to make a lazy comparison between alcoholism and art, but Robins’ description made me think more about how differently people encounter the world - about the unequal distribution of desire. Some people are called by things that leave others completely alone. That seems relevant to art.

I don’t mean that artists are walking around in a state of exquisite sensitivity, fainting at a particular blue on a plastic bag or seeing transcendence in a skip. There may be a bit of that, but my point isn’t about visual sensitivity… I think it’s about the compulsion to make something external. To take whatever is going on inside - thought, dread, embarrassment, desire, whatever - and turn it into a thing that exists outside of you. A painting. A sentence. A song. A joke. A form.

Some people live mostly by engaging with the world as it is. They work, plan, save, raise children, pay bills, replace the washing machine, get on with it. This is not lesser. It may be wiser. Others have a strange need to stand slightly to one side of the world and make versions of it. Not because they have better feelings than other people. Often they have worse ones. It’s more that experience doesn’t feel finished until it has been converted into something else. The world happens, and then there is this second demand: make something from it. Put it somewhere. Give it a body.

This is one of the difficulties in explaining art to people who don’t feel its pull. From the outside, becoming an artist can look ridiculous. You train for years for a profession with no clear entry point, no salary, no pension, no HR department, no normal ladder, no guarantee that talent will be noticed and no guarantee that being noticed will help. You make things that cost money to produce, store and frame, then wait for someone else to decide whether they’re worthwhile. You work in solitude, then submit yourself to the judgement of people who weren’t there when the work was made. Then, if you survive long enough, you discover that even success isn’t necessarily enough to live on.

A few weeks ago I wrote about artists in their twenties having no real sense of how expensive adult life will become. Mortgages, children and ageing parents remain abstract. They’re twenty-four and making work. They’re in the studio, at openings, falling in love with other artists and versions of themselves. They’re penniless, but in a way that still has glamour, because the future hasn’t yet sent an invoice.

Someone close to me heard this and said, “Well, that’s just thick.” From one angle, it is. There’s no sophistication in failing to understand compound interest or childcare costs. Artists can be really bad at adulthood. The romance of poverty tends to end when three thousand pounds is needed by Friday.

Yet the remark also showed the gap. For some people, life presents itself as a set of foreseeable obligations. You train, work, save and plan. You may not enjoy all of it, but the structure makes sense. For others, especially when young, that structure is there but oddly faint. Something else is louder. They’re seeing a different billboard. This is not an excuse. It’s a description.

The artist isn’t necessarily ignorant of ordinary life. They’re often aware of it in flashes, usually with dread. They know they should make more money. They know they should have a plan. They know their parents, partners or friends are not entirely wrong when they ask what the future looks like. The trouble is the work has its own urgency. A painting not yet made can feel more real than a pension not yet started. The exhibition next month feels more real than the mortgage application in twelve years. The thing calling from inside the work feels more real than the spreadsheet calling from adult life.

That’s where the comparison with Robins’ billboard becomes useful, if kept at the right distance. Addiction is a medical condition capable of wrecking lives; vocation is not. The narrower resemblance is that both can charge the world unevenly. The word vocation is old-fashioned now, and probably too flattering, but it still says something. Vocation is more than an interest or a hobby. It is the sense, sometimes ludicrous and sometimes accurate, that you have been claimed by a problem. The problem may be painting, music, writing or something less easily named. The object changes, but the world lights up around one set of cues and not another.

This is why condescension is so often inadequate. “Why don’t they just get a proper job?” “Why don’t they grow up?” “Why don’t they do it at weekends?” These aren’t stupid questions. Sometimes they are exactly the right questions. Sometimes artists need dragging out of the fog of their own self-mythology and reminding that other people exist. Sometimes the work isn’t calling. Sometimes the artist is just avoiding life, or enjoying the identity of seriousness without the labour of it.

Still, the questions miss something if they assume everyone is standing in front of the same world, seeing the same things with the same force. They aren’t. One person sees an advert for drink and sees design and lifestyle. Another person sees a door back into hell. One person sees a pile of old boards in a yard. Another sees a painting. One person sees a young artist making no money and says, reasonably enough, “That’s thick.” Another remembers being that age and knows that the word choice is not quite adequate.

The danger, of course, is that artists love this stuff. They love being given grand language for their poor decisions. They love being told the world does not understand them. The art world has produced a whole minor industry of noble suffering, as if being late with your VAT return were evidence of spiritual depth. So any defence of artistic compulsion has to be stripped of glamour. The call may be real and still make you selfish. The work may be necessary and still not good. The sacrifice may be genuine and still badly distributed, falling on partners, parents, children and whoever pays the rent while the artist discovers the next phase.

There is no automatic virtue in being seized by something. There is, however, a difference between foolishness and compulsion, even when they overlap. The artist who ignores money may be naive, vain, privileged, badly advised, romantically self-harming, or just twenty-three. They may also be responding to a real pressure from the work, a pressure that will not make sense to anyone who has never felt it.

That’s what Robins’ book made newly vivid for me. The comparison neither turns art into addiction nor the artist into a victim, and it offers no pardon for the usual flattering nonsense about creative souls being too pure for the marketplace. It suggests something harder and less convenient: people live inside different world views. Some are better adapted to the visible world, alert to the mortgage rate, job advert and pension statement. Others are being addressed by something more private and less useful, perhaps only the nagging sense of a picture that hasn’t yet been made and may never be worth anything.

The adult world does not care. It sends the invoice anyway. That’s the bit artists often learn too late. The work may call, but so does the bank. So does the landlord. So does the child. So does the body, eventually. You can be genuinely called and still have to pay for roof repairs. You can be serious and still be insolvent. You can be talented and still need a plan.

Perhaps that is the uncomfortable truth. The pull towards art is real, but reality is real too. The mistake is to pretend one cancels the other. To those outside the compulsion, artists look like people who have mistaken desire for destiny. To those inside it, ordinary prudence can look like a form of death and making art can be extraordinary. Neither side is entirely wrong.

Robins compresses the alcoholic’s bargain into one sentence: “Having given you something like magic, it will give you something like death.”

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of - Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose 1991 billboards placed an image of his empty bed across New York. Every passer-by received the same picture, though very few received the same message.

One book / essay / film / song - Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, from 2025. A filmmaker who has always put art first tries to use a new film to reach his estranged daughters.

One exhibition or historical reference - Bas Jan Ader’s In Search of the Miraculous, which ended with his 1975 solo Atlantic crossing and disappearance. Vocation could hardly produce a more seductive warning, though the art world has been polishing the tragedy ever since.

One related Blackbird Rook post - From Artist to Art Advisor: A Personal Reflection, from January 2025. The private calling eventually has to acquire a public job description, even if it leaves you feeling like a poacher turned gamekeeper.

One available work
Carlo D’Anselmi, In Good Condition II, 2019. Coloured pencil and ballpoint, the equipment of school desks and administration, used to make something stranger.

One unexpected tangent
Neuroscientists distinguish between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’: a cue can retain its magnetic pull after the pleasure has drained away. Awkwardly useful for careers too, since the studio sometimes keeps calling after the work has stopped giving much back.

A surprising number of people came back with the same question: fine, so what should I actually do? The obvious answer is a checklist. Write a will, catalogue the work, photograph everything, choose an executor and back up the files. All of that is sensible, but the argument beneath it is larger. Artists spend their working lives deciding what should be shown, what should face the wall and what should be scraped back or abandoned, but many stop making those decisions at the point when the consequences become permanent.

Your final work is unlikely to be your final painting, photograph, sculpture, film or drawing. What you can still shape is the decisions you leave behind: what exists, what counts as finished, who can speak for it, how it should be cared for and what people are allowed to throw away. You cannot control your reputation or your eventual place in art history, but you can influence whether the people who inherit the studio receive a coherent body of work or an archaeological dig.

Preparing an estate extends the same judgement an artist already exercises in the studio. It distinguishes the work from the accumulation around it and gives the people left behind enough authority to act without feeling that every box may contain an undiscovered masterpiece. What follows is not a scheme for becoming posthumously famous. It is a practical guide to leaving less chaos.

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I think about that house more than I probably should.

The question of what happens to an artist’s work when they die is one the art world discusses in public only when the answer is glamorous. The Basquiat estate. The Bacon studio and its extraordinary donation to the Hugh Lane in Dublin. The Warhol Foundation and its systematic transformation of commercial productivity into institutional endowment. These are the stories we tell: legacy as triumph, the work outlasting the body and entering the permanent record.

They are also extreme outliers.

For every artist whose estate becomes a foundation, there are hundreds whose work disperses, deteriorates, gets stored in conditions that damage it, gets given away to people who don’t know what they have, gets sold cheaply and without coordination in the months after death when no one is thinking clearly, gets argued over by family members who disagree about its value, or simply sits in a house in Wiltshire, doing nothing, slowly.

This is the ordinary fate of most serious work. Not destruction exactly. Something quieter and in some ways worse: gradual irrelevance, brought about not by neglect but by the absence of the one person who knew how to make it matter.

Collectors buy work that they will one day leave behind. Artists make work that will outlast them, or won’t. Dealers and advisors represent practices that depend, for their long-term value, on what happens to the estate. Critics and curators build arguments around artists whose posthumous fate is largely outside their control.

Yet the infrastructure for thinking clearly about all of this is remarkably thin.

There are no straightforward models. There is no standard process. There is no body that routinely steps in when an artist dies without having made arrangements, no protocol for identifying which estates need urgent attention, no mechanism for preserving the studio conditions that are themselves a form of cultural record. What there is instead is a patchwork of good intentions, family confusion, gallery ambivalence, occasional institutional interest and the random intervention of individuals who happen to care.

That randomness is the thing worth sitting with. Because it means the survival of serious work is, to a degree that should embarrass a culture that claims to value art, a matter of luck.

I have had the great honour of spending several years working on the estate of Clyde Hopkins, who was my head of painting at Chelsea in the late nineties. Clyde died in 2018. He left behind paintings, works on paper and drawings that are funny and formally rigorous, which is a harder combination to pull off than it sounds. They belong in any honest account of British painting in the last forty years. He also left behind exactly the situation that faces most serious artists of his generation: a reputation that was real but incomplete, a market that was thin, a gallery system that had no particular category for him, and a widow who loved him and had no intention of letting the work disappear but who needed help to stop that from happening.

What has followed has been, by any measure, more than most estates receive. There have been exhibitions in New York, in London and in Barrow-in-Furness, where he grew up. There is a book, Paintings on Paper, co-published by Anomie and Blackbird Rook, with essays by people who understood his work properly. There are collectors who now hold it with some understanding of what they have. There are institutions like The Tate and Hepworth who have acquired the work.

And all of this happened because a small number of people, Marilyn Hallam, his widow; a handful of gallerists and writers who cared; and, in a modest way, me, decided that it should happen and then spent years making it happen.

Take any one of those people out of the equation and the story changes. It may not end at the house in Wiltshire, but it moves in that direction.

The mechanics of estate mismanagement are rarely dramatic. They don’t usually involve villains or deliberate destruction. They involve the ordinary pressures of grief, time and money acting on situations for which nobody has prepared.

An artist dies, often unexpectedly, or after an illness during which practical thinking has been impossible. The studio, if there is one, is a problem immediately: rent, insurance, the cost of maintaining a space full of objects that are not yet money and may never be. The family, even if close to the artist, is rarely close to the art world and often feels out of its depth when approached by dealers, curators or collectors who appear to know what they want but whose motives are not entirely clear. Galleries that represented the artist in life may or may not step up. Some do, some don’t, and the ones that don’t often have good commercial reasons for their silence. The work that was not yet shown, not yet sold, not yet visible, is the most vulnerable of all.

In this gap, between the death and any kind of stable arrangement for what comes next, an enormous amount can go wrong. Prices get set too low by people who want cash quickly. Work gets distributed to family members who didn’t ask for it and won’t show it. Archives get lost or damaged. Studio visits happen with people who are not the right people. The estate gets locked into an arrangement with a dealer who turns out not to have the reach or the commitment the situation needs.

And all of this is before you get to the longer-term problem of keeping the work in circulation, in critical conversation, in the minds of curators and collectors over a period of decades. Which is what legacy actually requires.

The Warhol Foundation can do this because it has assets measured in hundreds of millions of dollars and a staff of professionals whose job it is. Most artist estates are run by one exhausted person at a kitchen table.

The gap between those two situations is not bridgeable by goodwill alone. But there are things that help, and they nearly all require the artist to have thought about them before they died, which most artists don’t: partly because thinking about your own death is unpleasant, partly because the art world has no strong culture of encouraging artists to do so, and partly because the question touches money, which artists are often not supposed to care about.

The things that help are not complicated. An up-to-date inventory of the work, with photographs, dimensions and provenance. A clear indication of who is authorised to make decisions about the estate. Some written record of the artist’s intentions, not a rigid programme, but enough to give an executor a direction. A conversation with any gallery, dealer or advisor with whom the artist has a relationship, about what happens next. A will that has actually been updated.

Almost none of this is expensive. Almost none of it requires a lawyer, though lawyers help. Almost all of it is the difference between an estate that can be managed and one that becomes the house in Wiltshire.

There is a harder argument underneath the practical one, which is about what we think art is for.

If we think it is primarily a commodity, a store of value, an investment, a market instrument, then the question of what happens to it after death is primarily a question about asset management, and the answers are the ones fund managers give. Diversify. Liquidate strategically. Protect the price.

If we think it is something else, a form of attention, a record of what it was like to look seriously at the world during a particular life, an object that continues to produce meaning for people who encounter it long after its maker is gone, then the question becomes different. It becomes: what does this work need, to keep doing what it does? And who is going to provide that?

The answer, almost always, is people. Not institutions primarily, though institutions matter. Not the market primarily, though the market matters. People who know the work, who care about it with some specific intelligence, who are willing to spend time on it without any guarantee of return, who understand that keeping serious work in the world is one of the things the world requires.

That is not a comfortable position. It is a position that involves labour, money, relationship management, patience and the occasional experience of talking to gallerists who are politely uninterested. But it is also, if you believe that serious art matters, one of the things that needs doing.

The house in Wiltshire is still there, as far as I know. The folders are probably still closed.

Shamefully I can’t remember the artist’s name, and I wouldn’t say it here if I did. What I know is that somewhere in those folders is work that deserved a different outcome. It did not need fame, a foundation, a retrospective or a catalogue raisonné. It needed someone who knew what it was, and turned up in time.

Timing, in the end, is most of it. The estate that gets the right person in the room in the first year is not the same estate as the one that doesn’t. The work is the same. The situation is the same. But the future is entirely different.

This is one of the things Blackbird Rook exists to do. It cannot rescue every overlooked estate; that would be impossible and probably arrogant. It can, for a small number of artists and families, be the person who turns up. Who knows what the work is. Who has the network, the patience and the genuine conviction to make something happen rather than letting the folders stay closed.

The work doesn’t advocate for itself. That’s the whole problem. It just sits there, in the dark, waiting for someone to care enough to open the door.

Next Wednesday, I’ll publish the practical companion to this piece, Your Last Work Is Your Estate, on what an artist should put in order before somebody else is left to decide what survives.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of - Stuart Cumberland. In 2016, after a one-person exhibition at The Approach, Stuart Cumberland put a body of paintings into storage and stopped working as an artist. He had not died, but the practice had effectively ended. He moved into psychoanalysis, leaving behind a substantial, coherent body of work that needed to be reconsidered almost as an estate. That was how I approached it in 2024. The task was to recover the work and decide how it might re-enter the world. The unusual thing was that Stuart was still there, able to explain the decisions, correct the record and take responsibility for his own artistic afterlife.

One song - “After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young. A song about aftermath, memory and the strange distance between what was imagined and what remains. It has the right mixture of tenderness and desolation for a piece about work surviving its maker, or failing to.

One historical reference - Francis Bacon’s studio at the Hugh Lane. After Bacon’s death, the contents of his Reece Mews studio were mapped, catalogued and transferred to Dublin, where the room was reconstructed in extraordinary detail. The paint, photographs, books and accumulated debris became a record of thought as much as a record of place. It is the glamorous exception, but also a demonstration of how much can be learned when the studio itself is treated as evidence.

One related Blackbird Rook post - “The Strange Grief of Moderate Success”. Both pieces are concerned with the gap between making serious work and receiving the future you once imagined for it. One asks what it feels like when recognition remains partial during a lifetime. The other asks what happens to the work when that lifetime ends.

One available work - Stuart Cumberland, Nicolas Hayek, 2010. A large painting built from four looping black forms that meet, cross and pull apart. It feels controlled and unstable at once, which makes it a particularly good work through which to reconsider Cumberland’s work.

One unexpected tangent - Seed banks, which preserve possibility rather than immediate usefulness, often without knowing what future conditions will require.

People say this about musicians all the time: I only like the early stuff. It’s often annoying - a way of saying, I was there before you, before the thing became too clean, too successful. That isn’t what I mean about Sarah Slappey. Her recent paintings are extraordinary: stranger, sharper, more deliberate, and increasingly confident in their own weird erotic logic. The paintings are big, slick and commanding, with bodies, hands, pearls, pins and limbs pressed into a much more emphatic pictorial machinery. They look like Slappey with the volume turned up.

Still, I have spent a lot of time with Squeeze, and there is something about this 2018 moment that I find hard to let go of. It comes from the period around Night Feeding, Slappey’s 2018 New York solo debut at Crush Curatorial. At that point, the language that would become recognisably hers was coming into focus: the long fingers, detached limbs, fleshy botanical forms, strange touch and bodily ambiguity. Squeeze is 20 x 20 inches, a small painting, but it contains a world.

The painting is mostly green, grey and yellow, with small areas of warm pinkish light. It looks, at first, like a dark thicket. Then fingers appear. Or things pretending to be fingers. They sprout, reach, press and fold into one another. The body is there, but not as a body. It has been distributed through the painting in parts: touch without personhood, flesh without portrait, intimacy without the reassurance of a full figure.

Slappey has said that she uses detached limbs as a way to talk about “the body, rather than a body”, and that disfigured limbs reduce the distance between viewer and painted figure because the phantom limb might belong to no one, something unknown, or even the viewer. That is exactly what happens here. There is no stable person to look at. No face to organise your response. No nude reclining politely under the old art-historical contract. Just touching, pressing, probing, sprouting.

What I like especially about Squeeze is that it still seems situated. Not realistically, not in any sensible room or landscape, but spatially. There is a place in there. A damp, theatrical, underlit place. The fleshy leaves emerge from a dark environment, as if they are growing in it or being caught by it. Later Slappey paintings often become more graphic, more compressed, more assertively frontal. They do not need the same illusionistic murk. They make their own space out of bodies, colour and pressure.

I understand that move. It’s a good move. Plenty of painters I admire have found ways to remove the drama from represented space and put it into the surface itself. Ivy Haldeman does it with those slippery hot-dog bodies. Ellen Berkenblit does it with images that feel staged and flattened at once. Things can happen in a painting without needing a room for them to happen in.

Still, Squeeze has the pleasure of the earlier in-between state. It hasn’t quite given up the world. The forms are not floating symbols yet. They are still half-hidden in a place.

That place matters. The ArtMaze interview from 2018 describes Slappey’s paintings as “jungles of feet and hands”, with limbs twisting like vines, and notes the harsh, almost cinematic lighting. In Squeeze, the painting behaves like a small horror film in which nothing actually happens except the gradual discovery that everything is touching everything else.

The title is good too. Squeeze sounds blunt and physical. It could be affectionate, comic, sexual, threatening, childish. A squeeze of the hand, a squeeze through a gap, a squeeze too hard. Slappey’s work often sits exactly on that line between caress and grip. In the Soft Grip text, I described her painting as caught between comfort and constraint, between touch as nurturing and touch as controlling. Looking again at this work, that still seems right, but the painting itself is less neat than the sentence.

The tendrils are not simply doing something to someone. They are also being absorbed by the image. The central pale form looks swollen and soft, but the fingers around it are not easy to read as either tender or violent. Everything is too close. The painting does not give you the clean moral pleasure of identifying harm from the outside. It puts you in the sensation.

That is where Slappey’s paintings are strongest. They are not illustrations of female embodiment or clever reversals of the nude. They are paintings about what it feels like to have a body that is never only yours: touched, watched, imagined, desired, decorated, injured, hidden, made strange.

Squeeze is less polished than some of the later work, and I think that helps it. It has a looseness - the paint is smoky, rubbed, almost fugitive. The forms are less sealed. There is still air between them, even if it is damp air. The shadows do real work. They don’t just dramatise the image; they give it uncertainty. This is why I don’t think of Squeeze as minor because it is small, or transitional because it comes early. It is a painting made at the moment when Slappey’s vocabulary had arrived but had not yet hardened into its most recognisable form. The limbs are there. The touch is there. The queasy beauty is there. The sinister sweetness is there. But so is the atmosphere.

It is a strange little painting. Not loud, not obvious, not trying to be the definitive Slappey. Just a cluster of pale fingers and swollen forms in the dark, working out how much pressure a painting can apply before pleasure becomes something else.

I just wrote a short piece for Plaster about one of the more excruciating rituals of being an artist: having to talk about your own work. The question was simple enough: I find it embarrassing talking about my own work, even when I know I need to. Is that normal, and how do I explain what I’m doing without sounding either pompous or apologetic?

Yes. It is normal. More than normal. It is probably one of the few nearly universal experiences among artists. Even the ones who appear to do it well often have a practised mask of fluency, a kind of varnish applied over panic. The words come out, but somewhere beneath them is the familiar dread: am I explaining this, or killing it? Am I helping the work, or dressing it up? I know of at least one blue chip artist who was overheard parroting explanatory lines he’d scoffed at when spoken by a thoughtful assistant only a few hours earlier.

There is an obvious reason for this. Art often does something language cannot quite do on its own. A painting is not a badly written essay. A sculpture is not a paragraph that lost its way and became three-dimensional. The work has its own means: colour, surface, scale, material, doubt, stupidity, awkwardness, beauty.

So when someone asks an artist, standing beside the thing they have made, “What’s it about?”, there is already a small betrayal in the question. If the answer could be neatly substituted for the work, the work would not need to exist.

There is another reason too. Many artists become artists because words are not their natural habitat. They may be clever, articulate and funny, even brilliant when talking about other people’s work, but their own work is different. It has come from somewhere less tidy. It has arrived through looking, doing, undoing, choosing, failing, repeating and waiting.

The studio is not a lecture theatre. Most artists do not make work by calmly applying an argument. They find things out by handling them. And then, having done all that, they are expected to stand in a room full of people holding plastic cups of wine and reduce it to a few elegant sentences. No wonder they look hunted.

There is a second difficulty, and it is less flattering. Some artists find it hard to talk about their work because they do not quite know what they are doing. I do not mean that cruelly. It is not necessarily a failure of intelligence, or even a failure of the work. Sometimes good work arrives before understanding does. The artist is following an instinct before they know how to name it. The trouble begins when the not-knowing is covered with the wrong sort of language.

Art schools can produce this problem very efficiently. Students are encouraged to read, which is good. They are encouraged to think, which is better. They are encouraged to place their work in relation to politics, theory, history and the body, which may be useful and may also become fog. The danger is not theory itself. The danger is a surface-level relationship with theory: a few grand words dragged into service before they have been properly understood.

At that point, language stops clarifying the work and starts decorating it. Worse, it starts protecting it. The statement becomes a hedge. The artist knows the work may not yet be fully formed, so they build a thicket of words around it. The viewer is kept outside. Everyone nods solemnly. Nobody is much wiser.

I used to teach dissertation students at an art school outside London, and I saw versions of this often. In the second year, I would meet someone making vivid, strange, energetic paintings. Often they were about something the student could not quite name yet: shame, fantasy, class. The work might be rough, inconsistent, unresolved, but it had life in it. It seemed to come from somewhere real.

Then, a year later, I would go to the degree show and find two sheets of glass leaning against the wall, accompanied by a statement full of theoretical mist. Nearby, the parents would stand with the expression of people trying very hard to remain supportive while privately remembering the financial cost of those three years.

This is not an argument against glass. Glass can be great. It is not an argument against conceptual work, or theory, or difficulty. It is an argument against artists abandoning their own intelligence in favour of a style of seriousness they have been led to believe looks more grown-up. Because often the real problem is not that the artist cannot talk about the work. The problem is that the work has drifted away from what the artist is actually interested in.

That word “actually” is doing a lot of work. What are you actually interested in? Not what do you think you should be interested in. Not what looks good in a funding application. Not what sounds convincing in a gallery statement. What do you look at when no one is checking? What do you watch when you are ill? What do you return to, even though you are slightly embarrassed by it? What did you love before you knew what counted as taste?

People are strange about this. Ask many people what they watch and they will say, “Mostly documentaries,” with the slightly rigid expression of someone declaring a customs item. Really? Only documentaries? No terrible dating programme? No police procedural from 2007? No YouTube video of a man restoring a lawnmower? Fine, if the answer is really documentaries, but the useful material is often hidden in the thing people almost say and then do not.

When I taught dissertation seminars, I used to begin by asking students to describe their work as plainly as possible. Not to explain it. Not to justify it. Just describe it. “I make paintings of rooms from memory.” “I collect failed images and remake them.” “I use domestic fabrics to make sculptural forms.”

This is already useful. Description is underrated. Artists often try to leap over it because they think it sounds too simple. But description is the ground floor. Materials, scale, process, decisions, failures, revisions - these are not boring technical details. They are often where the meaning has been hiding.

Then I would ask a different set of questions. What book do you love? What film do you keep watching? What would you do on a day off? What did you make when you were ten? That last one is useful. I think mature artists are making grown-up versions of what they made at ten. Not literally, necessarily. But the impulse is there. Drawing maps. Inventing monsters. Building tiny houses. Constructing whole worlds in the corner of a bedroom. Before the CV. Before theory. Before taste became something to be performed.

One of my favourite examples of this process involved an older student, a retired chief executive, who came back to art school later in life and made very good, strange work. One piece was a large coffee-table book made entirely from failed analogue photographs: overexposed landscapes, cropped heads, fingers over lenses. Another was a leather-bound copy of St John’s Gospel translated entirely into barcode. A third was a sandwich board with a giant QR code on it, which he wore around Tunbridge Wells. If you scanned the code, it said: “The end is nigh.”

This was not weak work. It was funny, precise and odd. It had a lovely relationship with failed communication, religious form, warnings, signs and useless accuracy. But when it came to a topic for his dissertation, he was stuck.

So we talked about what he loved. His favourite film was Tampopo, Juzo Itami’s film about the pursuit of the perfect noodle restaurant. His other great love was fly fishing: tying the fly, reading the water, casting into precisely the right place, waiting for the moment when the made thing becomes convincing enough to be taken by a fish.

And suddenly the dissertation became obvious. It was about perfection. Not perfection as polish, but perfection as pursuit, ritual, failure, comedy and faith. The perfect noodle. The perfect fly. The perfect unreadable book. Once that clicked, he wrote beautifully, because he was no longer trying to sound like an artist. He was following the thread that was already there.

That, I think, is the point. Talking about your work becomes much easier when the work is connected to something you actually care about. Not necessarily something noble. Not necessarily something academically respectable. Not something you would put on a grant form without editing. Something real.

The art world is very good at making people suspicious of their own pleasures. Humour is downgraded. Beauty is treated with caution. Popular culture is smuggled in only once it has been made safe by theory. But art often begins in exactly those places. In the things that catch in the mind and will not leave. In the embarrassing enthusiasm. In the unnecessary knowledge. In the thing you keep noticing. The mistake is to think that talking plainly about these things makes the work smaller. It does not. It gives the work a door.

Of course, this does not mean artists should never read difficult books. Quite the opposite. Read properly. Read deeply. Read things that alter you. Read theory if it gives you more precise instruments. But do not use reading as a costume. Do not drag a philosopher into the room to do a job the work should be doing itself.

The artist statement should not be a defensive wall. It should be a path. A good statement does not say, “Here is the meaning.” It says, “Here is where I began. Here is what I kept returning to. Here is what changed as I worked. Here is what I am still trying to understand.”

That last part is important. Artists are often frightened of admitting uncertainty because they think it makes the work look unfinished. But uncertainty is not the same as confusion. Some of the best work is made from a highly specific uncertainty. The artist knows the territory, but not the conclusion. The viewer can feel the difference.

So if you find it embarrassing to talk about your work, do not begin by trying to become more impressive. Begin by becoming more accurate. Describe what you do. Then ask what you actually care about. Then ask where the two overlap.

The embarrassment may not disappear. It probably shouldn’t. A little embarrassment is healthy. It means you know the work is not just content. It means you know there is something slightly absurd about explaining the work, while someone nods beside a trestle table of warm wine.

But you can make the embarrassment useful. You can let it stop you from becoming pompous. You can let it stop you from becoming slick. You can let it remind you that the work does not need a sermon. It needs a route in, and perhaps the best route in is the one that sounds least like an artist statement and most like a person thinking honestly about what they have made. “I thought I was painting landscape, but I think I was really painting waiting rooms.” “I started with a memory of a television programme I used to watch, though I was embarrassed to admit that.” None of this is simplistic. It is exact, and exactness is usually better than grandeur.

Rabbit Holes

One artist this made me think of - Rose Wylie - because she has made a serious practice out of not laundering her interests. Football, films, memory, awkward drawing, cartoonish scale, bits of popular culture. The work doesn’t apologise for where it starts.

One film - Juzo Itami, Tampopo - still the right one for this piece because it is already inside the essay. It turns obsession, appetite, ritual and absurd precision into a whole way of thinking about art without ever sounding like an artist statement.

One exhibition or historical reference - The Independent Group at the ICA - especially the moment when advertising, comics, science fiction, domestic design and mass culture started entering British art not as low material to be redeemed, but as things artists were already looking at.

One related Blackbird Rook post - The Wise Middle - because this piece is also arguing against false extremes. Not anti-theory, not anti-seriousness, not “just be yourself” in some lazy way. More that the strongest position is often the least theatrical one: say what you actually do, what you actually look at and what you actually care about.

One available work - Marilyn Hallam - she starts from things that could be dismissed as ordinary: interiors, flowers, household space, looking at what is close by. The seriousness is in the attention, not in dressing the subject up.

One unexpected tangent - Desert Island Discs - not the prestige choices, but the little moment when someone’s mask slips and they pick the song that actually formed them. That is often where the real person appears: not in the clever selection, but in the embarrassing one.

When I was first drawn to Marilyn Hallam’s work, it was paintings like this that held me. The figure in a room. The window. The sense of someone caught between activity and self-consciousness. A person turning, dressing, arranging herself, failing slightly to settle into the image. For a long time, Not Finding a Pose was my favourite Marilyn painting.

That has changed a little. Or rather, widened. I now find myself just as absorbed by the paintings with no figures at all: rooms, windows, mirrors, tables, plants, bits of domestic architecture held in a state of pictorial suspense. Still, this painting remains a key work for me because it contains so much of what makes Marilyn’s paintings particular. It has the figure, but it is not really a portrait. It has the room, but the room is not simply a setting. It has a pose, but the whole point is that the pose won’t quite arrive.

The title is unusually good. Not Finding a Pose. It sounds almost comic, like a small failure in front of a camera or mirror. Yet it also describes something deeper in the painting. The figure is not offered as a settled image of herself. She turns back towards us while holding, or lifting, a board or stretcher. Her body is wrapped in a long pink and blue garment, part dressing gown, part painterly event. Her head is small, dark and alert. Her arm reaches out across a hard-edged plane of orange, yellow and green. She is both inside the room and oddly caught in the act of becoming part of its construction.

The collage tells you a great deal. Before the painting becomes this fluid, luminous thing, it has passed through a much harder process of cutting, testing and rebuilding. The coloured-paper study is almost brutal in its clarity. The figure is reduced to blocks: purple, black, red, green, orange, pale blue. The window is a stack of bands. The chair is a green cross and an orange plane. The room becomes a problem of shape before it becomes an atmosphere.

That matters because Marilyn’s paintings can be misleading at first. They look airy. They look immediate. They have light moving through them. The paint feels loose, thin, responsive. Yet behind that apparent ease is an exacting preparatory process: drawings, photographs, tracings, photocopies, acetates, cutouts, revisions. She has described making “many variations” before knowing how the painting should be put together, and then using strips of paper to frame the drawing before introducing coloured cutouts. The colour is not decoration added at the end. It is part of the search.

This is where Not Finding a Pose becomes more interesting than a painting of a woman in a room. The subject is unstable because the method is unstable, in the best sense. The painting does not begin with a fixed image to be transcribed. It begins with a situation, a set of possibilities, a body, a space and a lot of doubt about how they might become a painting. Marilyn has said she wanted to avoid naturalism or “common sense” in her depictions. That phrase is useful here. Common sense would put the woman in the room, describe the room around her and let the picture behave. Marilyn does something better. She lets the room, the window, the chair, the rug, the doorway and the body all negotiate with one another.

The drawing is fascinating because it shows the image before colour has taken over. The figure is already there, turning, awkward, alert, but she is held in a network of searching lines. The room is still provisional. The window, curtain, chair and floor have not yet become the glowing structure of the painting. They are being worried into place.

Then, in the final painting, colour arrives and changes everything. The blue curtains do not simply frame the window. They pull the left side of the painting downward and inward. The garden beyond the window is loose, pale and almost dissolving, yet the balcony rail keeps it measured. The right-hand wall is yellow-green, with a doorway opening into a second, warmer room. The chair is barely a chair, really: more a tilted argument of orange, pink and wood. The rug at the bottom is white, grey and green, and it steadies the whole thing just enough.

The figure sits between these systems. She is not more “real” than the room. Her gown is described with lines, washes and scumbles that are as abstract as the paper shapes in the cutout. Pink drops into blue. Purple becomes shadow. The sleeve turns into a hard edge. The hand is a blunt brown interruption. It is all depiction, but not naturalism. Marilyn’s word “depictive” is exact. She gives us the thing seen, but not as a servant of likeness.

Mali Morris once wrote beautifully about the “double intimacy” in Marilyn’s paintings: the intimacy of the domestic subject, and the intimacy of a painter thinking very hard on a flat surface. That is very present here. The room feels lived in, but it does not sentimentalise domestic life. The figure feels psychologically charged, but the painting does not reduce itself to psychology. You are looking at a woman not finding a pose, but you are also looking at a painting finding its form.

Cuillin Bantock wrote that Marilyn’s ordinary subjects are never treated in an ordinary way. Views through windows, interiors, still life, figures: the vocabulary may appear modest, but the treatment is rigorous. That seems especially true here. There is nothing grand in the subject. No drama in the theatrical sense. A woman, a room, a garden, a board, a chair. Yet the painting has its own drama: the drama of relation, of how one colour leans against another, how one edge interrupts another, how a body can be both image and structure.

I like the fact that the painting refuses the obvious kinds of finish. It does not polish the awkwardness out. The face is strange. The space is beautiful but not comfortable. The figure has the faint look of someone caught doing something private and not quite sure whether to continue. That uncertainty gives the painting its life.

It is also a painting about making paintings. Not in a dry, self-referential way, but in the ordinary, bodily, studio sense. A person in a room with an object in her hands, surrounded by rectangles, thresholds, openings, bits of furniture and colour. It is a painting about how a picture comes together, and how it resists coming together too easily.

That is why the preparatory material is so valuable. The collage shows the architecture. The drawing shows the searching. The painting shows the release. None of those stages cancels the others. They remain present in the final work. You can still feel the cut paper underneath the colour. You can still feel the pencil inside the paint.

Not Finding a Pose is a serious painting because it understands hesitation. It knows that a figure is not a fixed thing, a room is not a neutral container and colour is not a surface pleasure. Everything is active. Everything has to be found… Or not quite found. That is the point.

There was something touching about that. Also very funny. Not because The Bill is beneath anyone, but because the justification was much more embarrassing than the pleasure. Liking a programme is harmless. Pretending that what really draws you back is the structural sophistication of the subplots is where the trouble begins. People would often rather justify pleasure than admit it.

I came into the art world as an artist before approaching it as an advisor, and so my art world is framed by artists and most of the artists I know are not embarrassed by enthusiasm. They are full of it. They talk about films, music, old paintings, bad television, things half-remembered from childhood. They are often at their best when they are most openly excited about something.

The same is true of many of the collectors I work with. A lot of them are new to collecting, or still close enough to the beginning not to have learned the defensive manners. They look properly. They ask direct questions. They say when something has got them. Part of the pleasure of the job is helping people trust that first response without being ruled by it.

So this is not a complaint about everyone. It is more a thing I see out of the corner of my eye. A mood in the culture. A tone that drifts in from the edges, especially around professionalised taste, anxious cleverness, half-digested theory, market gossip and the small social panic of wanting to sound informed before you have worked out what you actually think.

There is safety in disliking things. Thinking of something as bad gives you material. It gives you angles, jokes and distance. You can take a thing apart and, for a few minutes at least, appear cleverer than the thing you are taking apart. Criticism gives the speaker somewhere safe to stand. It says: I have seen through this. I know the trick. I know the market. I know what sort of person this is for, and I am not that person.

Liking is harder because it gives more away. To like something is to come out from behind the wall. It exposes taste, appetite, sentimentality, need. It tells people what moves you before you have had time to make it clever. It risks making you look naive, obvious, insufficiently alert to the hidden machinery of things. Worse, it risks making you sound pleased. There are few states contemporary culture finds more suspicious than being pleased.

We have become fluent in qualified liking. I loved it, but. It was beautiful, although. It was moving, despite. We keep adding small legal clauses to our own responses, as though pleasure has to be escorted through customs by a more respectable adult. Online especially, criticism has acquired the glamour of intelligence. Detachment reads as sophistication. Sarcasm travels faster than attention. The put-down travels further than a paragraph of praise.

Art has its own versions of this. The first things that draw people towards art are often the things they later learn to disguise. Colour. Beauty. Strangeness. Humour. Skill. The shock of recognition. Then the education begins.

Sometimes this is real education, and it deepens everything. It gives a person more to see, more to ask, more to compare, more to doubt. It makes the first response less lonely.

At other times, it becomes social training. People learn which responses sound grown-up. They learn not to say beautiful too quickly. They learn that to be moved is embarrassing unless they can explain the movement in terms dry enough to cancel the evidence. They learn to put the clever sentence between themselves and the thing that just happened.

The result is not seriousness. It is solemnity wearing the clothes of seriousness. There is a difference. Seriousness is sustained attention. It is the willingness to stay with something difficult without immediately converting it into slogan, content, identity, price or proof. Seriousness is not allergic to pleasure. Some of the most serious works of art are funny. Some are beautiful. Some work through seduction rather than refusal.

Solemnity is what appears when people are afraid that pleasure might make them look unintelligent. It prefers the work to arrive pre-wounded, pre-authorised, pre-defended. It likes beauty damaged, humour redeemed, sensuality theorised.

Beauty suffers particularly badly from this. Not because beauty has disappeared from contemporary art, but because it often now requires an alibi. It is safer if it arrives damaged like a photograph of a bullet wound. Safer if it has melancholy in it. Safer if the artist can say, very quickly, that beauty is not really what the work is about.

Some caution here is fair. Empty beauty exists. There is work whose attractiveness is merely cosmetic. Prettiness can be stupid and charm can be a narcotic, but that is not the only choice.

Beauty can be intelligent. It can carry contradiction more effectively than explanation. It can hold grief without announcing it, comedy without apologising, desire without becoming soft. The problem is not pleasure itself. The problem is pleasure without thought, and thought that has become frightened of pleasure.

Direct aesthetic response has become socially risky in certain rooms. To say “I love that” before you have checked the temperature is to expose yourself. What if the work is unfashionable? What if the artist is not serious enough? What if someone better informed thinks it is obvious, decorative, market-led, too pretty, too easy?

So people delay. They ask where the artist studied. They check the CV, the institutional signals, the Instagram following, the fair booth, the auction record, the mood of the room. None of this is irrelevant. Context matters. Judgement matters. Nobody should be flattered into idiocy by their own first response, but there is a difference between testing your response and outsourcing it.

This is where the problem begins. Not in caution itself, but in the habit of looking sideways before looking again. The art world has built part of its economy around the fear of liking the wrong thing. Not all of it. Not the part I value most, but enough to make people hesitate. Collectors become afraid of looking stupid. Artists become afraid of making work that looks too pleasurable, too sincere, too close to the thing they actually love. You hear it in the qualifying clause, the defensive joke, the tiny apology that arrives just after someone says they love something.

And yet the ability to like well is one of the most important forms of judgement. This does not mean liking everything, or drifting through culture in a warm bath of approval. It does not mean confusing pleasure with quality, or beauty with depth. Good liking is not passive. It is not the opposite of discrimination. It is discrimination with more at stake.

To like well means being able to say: this is doing something to me, and I am prepared to find out why. It means allowing the first response to exist without immediately either obeying it or apologising for it. It means knowing that suspicion is useful, but not sufficient. It means recognising that some things are strong before you have the language to defend them.

In art, the work that changes someone’s eye rarely arrives in the safe form of a confirmed opinion. It often begins as attraction mixed with embarrassment. You are drawn to something and slightly irritated by being drawn to it. You return to the image. You distrust your own pleasure. You wonder whether the work is too beautiful, too strange, too funny, too direct, too much like something you once loved before you learned better manners. So you look again, and that second look is where judgement begins.

Many artists spend years negotiating the things they love. They arrive with private attachments and then work out which of these can be spoken of plainly and which have to be smuggled back into the work under more respectable names.

Sometimes the smuggling improves things. Constraint can turn a source into something stranger. Embarrassment can complicate a work in productive ways. But sometimes the work dies because the artist has become too ashamed of the thing that gave it energy in the first place. Appetite is replaced with position. Pleasure is replaced with explanation. The work sounds cleverer and becomes less necessary.

This is one of the small risks of cultural seriousness: people can be educated out of the responses that made them worth educating.

The useful place is not innocence, nor is it cynicism, the proud refusal to be fooled. It is something more difficult than either: staying close enough to the first response to hear it, and far enough away to test it.

The best collectors are not the ones who like everything, or the ones who know how to sound clever in front of everything. They are the ones who pay attention to the moment before embarrassment arrives, when something catches, irritates, seduces or unsettles them. Then they test it rather than either obeying it or killing it.

They know that first response can be wrong, vain, lazy, nostalgic or easily bought. But they do not kill it merely because it arrived without permission. The point is not to like more things. It is to become less frightened of the moment before you know what your liking means.

Rabbit holes

One artist this made me think of - R.B. Kitaj - not because the work is simply “about” liking, but because he never quite gave up the embarrassing force of attachment: books, Jewishness, films, Cézanne, Degas, London, sex, argument. A painter of learned enthusiasm, not cool detachment.

One book - Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation - it argues for more attention to what art does before we rush to translate it into meaning. Less excavation, more sensation.

One exhibition or historical reference - The Pictures Generation - a useful counterpoint. So much late twentieth-century art taught people to distrust images, desire and pleasure, often brilliantly. The problem is what happens when suspicion becomes a default manner rather than an active intelligence.

One related Blackbird Rook post - The Signal and the Static - because it sits near the same problem: how to keep your own eye alive inside a culture of noise, positioning, inherited opinion and second-hand confidence.

One available work - Zoe Spowage, Sweet ball and socket joints - a good fit because it doesn’t apologise for pleasure. It is bodily, odd, funny, seductive and intelligent without trying to cancel its own appeal.

One unexpected tangent - People saying they watch reality TV “as sociology” - sometimes it is sociology. Often it is just people enjoying chaos, flirting, kitchens, bad decisions and the relief of other people being more exposed than they are. The alibi is usually less interesting than the pleasure.

When I started writing here, I thought I was mostly writing for collectors. I wanted to make collecting feel less sealed off and less mystifying. To explain works, prices, contexts and decisions in plain English. To make it possible for more people to begin looking seriously, without feeling they had accidentally wandered into a room where everyone else knew the rules.

That is still part of it, but I keep finding myself writing as much for artists as for collectors. Writing about the difficulty of keeping a life in art going. The beauty of it too. The compromises, the absurdities, the long attrition, the strange forms of hope. The things people often know but don’t say.

Of course, the more time I spend writing, the less time I spend doing the things that actually fund my life: introducing artists to collectors, making selections, helping sales happen. That is the slightly ridiculous bargain I’ve made with myself.

So a small request. If you enjoy the longer Sunday pieces, or the shorter One Piece Worth Seeing notes in between them, I’d be very grateful for paid subscriptions. It’s £5 a month. Individually, that is not a grand act of patronage, but thankfully, collectively, it helps justify the time these pieces take. It lets me keep writing about the parts of art that are often ignored because they don’t sit neatly inside press releases, sales emails or professional optimism. And you’ll also have access to the full back catalogue of essay, the really substantial Professional Practice and Collector’s guides, and these monthly Collector’s Notes.

This month’s Collector’s Note brings together five artists at very different points in their careers: Yoona Kwon, who has just completed her MFA at the Slade; Susannah Pal, making highly charged graphite drawings that sit somewhere between romance, image culture and psychological theatre; Edmond Brooks-Beckmann, whose work has moved quickly since the RCA; Sara Rossberg, a German-born London painter with more than five decades behind her; and Clyde Hopkins, represented here by a large 1989 painting from one of the key transitional moments in his work.

The works range from £800 to £17,600 + VAT. They are not linked by style. What connects them is something else: the sense that each artist understands surface as an active field. Organza, graphite, monotype, pigment, oil paint. These are not just materials used to make an image. They are the place where the image thinks.

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