All unnecessary

Walking down the Broadway, I bumped into a fellow artist. I had seen his work on the wall of another artist recently, I mentioned to him. Metal rods, the white spaces of positive and negative, described a fish twisting or jumping, but there was something architectural about it, exploratory, playful, confident at the same time. Lovely. That lust - that desire - the "I wants" I call it, grabbed me when I saw that piece. It doesn't happen very often. Well, I politely told him I had seen his work and that I had liked it. 

Then he mentioned that John at Atelier Gallery had recently acquired an Eduardo Paolozzi. I hastily made my excuses (how rude) and a beeline for Atelier, I was itching to see this work. John has superb taste, everything he has is always desirable. If you have no taste, go to Atelier and let John hang art on your walls, furnish your home and give you that lust for life and beauty. If you have taste, you'll have died and gone to heaven at Atelier.

John has an eye. Not many people have it. One other artist I know has a visual literacy and impartiality to measure, judge, assess and and then move on from whatever it is she happens to be presented with at the time, and then becomes totally blindsided by her own work and gets "all unnecessary": that's what we call it here in Essex; in Ireland you'd be told to get a grip; in Northern Ireland, catch yourself on. That's what I had to do, looking at John's considerable and desirable collection.

Interestingly, John told me a story about a significant investment he was considering. What made his decision was that he didn't like the person who currently held that piece, and it swayed him into not investing. An emotional decision - his to make, and much more common than we are prepared to admit, it's human nature. This desire for the ownership of beauty is sometimes about who delivers it, as much as we don't want it to be emotional, that cool elusive eye escaped. In contrast: another artist who inferred that being An Artist was a blank cheque to be as indiscriminate as one likes with emotion in one's work. I didn't like that at all and yet she produces some technically graceful work, even if it is scattered with the remnants of sentimentalism. Shame to let loose the 'all unnecessary'. Get a grip. Catch yourself on.

That cool impartiality is more than a gift or talent, it's something else: to make ordinance, to size, summate, and yet have that passionate feeling, that gutteral instinct for form, material, balance, surface, sometimes function, the butteriness of a brushstroke, the fineness of inset stones, the very stuffness of a thing. It's the hallmark of a collector for me, a superb art dealer, and for an artist, an inner strength and control to bend emotion to become subservient to the purpose of the object, the reason d'etre, the rhyme and reason of a thing. Totally necessary, and the pursuit and ownership of beauty? A total necessity.