Writing
Essays on art history, process, colour, collecting, and the experience of looking.
SpiritualityThe earliest art humans ever made was not decoration. It was prayer. I did not understand that until I was sixteen years old, in the middle of the night, drawing three figures I had never seen before.
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Art HistoryThe Renaissance did not rediscover the ancient world. It invented a version of it that suited its own ambitions, and that invention changed everything.
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TechnologyEvery new imaging technology has changed not just how we make images but how we see. The camera obscura, photography, cinema, the screen. We are in the middle of another such change now.
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ExperienceA painting made five hundred years ago is not the same object it was when it left the studio. Time is not the enemy of art. It is one of its materials.
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ExperienceWe remember paintings we have seen in ways we do not remember most other experiences. The image lodges somewhere specific. Years later, it is still there.
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Art HistoryA century and a half after Millais floated Ophelia in a Surrey stream, the Brotherhood's obsession with truth to nature feels startlingly contemporary.
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ProcessFrom the Situationists' dérive to Richard Long's muddy circles, artists have long understood that moving through a landscape changes what you see and what you make.
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Colour TheoryThe idea that blue is calming and red is exciting is everywhere in design and marketing. The research is considerably more complicated.
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CollectingYou do not need to be wealthy to build a meaningful collection. You need curiosity, patience, and a willingness to trust your own eye.
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ExperienceLate-night openings change the relationship between viewer and work. Something about the hour strips away the social performance of museum-going.
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TechnologyWhen a machine generates an image from a text prompt, who made it? The question is not new. Photography asked it first. But the stakes feel different now.
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