- Venue
- London Art Fair
- Location
- United Kingdom
At Art Fairs, even small ones, it is easy to become overwhelmed and get to the stage of visual fatigue where fabulous, meaningful art barely registers. It always helps to have an agenda, even if it is a fictional one, like an imaginary budget.
I have long had a fascination in charity shops, where alongside looking for interesting or good stuff, I am irresistibly drawn to seeking out the worst, most hideous items, and marvelling at their very existence. If I had infinite space and budget I would probably have a warehouse full of hilarious orange towelling, metallic lycra, and purple and green crimplene clothing as examples of how not to do it.
Similarly, while the eye in art is drawn to those aspects we like and relate to, we are struck by aesthetics that clash with our own. Living with a piece is also different to studying or appreciating it – it must be like grandchildren that you are happy to experience but thankful to give back. At an Art Fair you are free to pass on by works you simply don’t like.
I’ve visited this Art Fair before, and I think that it is improving in that it is less a shop-front for commercial galleries and has more genuine attempts at creating projects and being responsive to contemporary ideas and artists.
It’s great to see treasures and to contemplate owning them – a Charles Rennie MacIntosh watercolour would be a very desirable proposition for an expatriate Glaswegian.
Four Square Arts Gallery had a few contemplative photographers I especially loved – Rosa Basurto, but for me, the pieces I keep on thinking about were paintings by David Whittaker at Millenium Gallery. Whittaker is a self-taught painter and won the National Open Art Competition in 2011. I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw these – they are very exciting layers of abstraction and reality, figure and landscape, then and now, suggestion and imagination, and so on. I could definitely live with these – it’s art that keeps on giving, changing and revealing.
