Dispatches from the Field

Made, Not Chosen – A Whisper with Weight

Every so often, I go rooting through the old spreadsheets. Quiet archaeology. To see who bought what, when, and whether it’s time to reconnect. I like keeping a feel for it – for the rhythm of a collector’s eye over time. What they were drawn to, what they paired and grouped together, what they circled back for. And then I sit with the works that might align well beside what they already have – to deepen the conversation in their collection.

I was doing a little of that yesterday. Reaching out to a few old collectors, tracing the arc of their tastes. Looking back a few years, it’s always hard to tell, isn’t it – whether something felt beautiful because of the spirit of the time, or because it really holds something timeless. But there were definite threads. Certain visual rhythms that kept showing up. A kind of quiet eloquence. I’ll try to describe what I saw.

What I was noticing was a chalky intensity. Not in colour exactly, but in finish. The surface held a softness – like limed walls, or that Tadelakt texture you sometimes see in Morocco. Softly burnished, almost skin-like. Like quiet light.

It doesn’t have to be matte. Sometimes there’s the faintest sheen, but the softness is still there. It’s less about surface, more about pigment. How it settles. How it carries light. It’s a texture you feel more than see. That kind of quiet seduction – a whisper with weight.

And it’s not all pale or pastel. Some of the colours are incredibly vibrant. That powdery quality doesn’t mean desaturated – it’s the powderiness of pure pigment. Like those triangular piles of colour in Indian markets. Dense, saturated, luminous. It’s about concentration. These are colours with punch – not watered down, but finely tuned.

And it’s a certain kind of colour, too. The kind that’s been mixed – not chosen. These aren’t shop-bought pigments. They’re made. I did a painting course recently where the teacher limited our palette to just two colours and white. That was it. An exercise in discipline: looking, mixing, trying again. You realise how much presence it takes to get a colour right. Not just skill – but patience. Attention.

What happens is, an artist ends up with something that’s uniquely their own. Yes, you can buy beautiful paints – and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a different quality when the colour has been made, mixed – when the artist has looked, adjusted, looked again. It becomes embodied. Carries something else. As in nature – those subtle, unnameable shades you can only try to replicate faithfully from real looking.

And you can feel it, in the work – when the colour’s been earned like that. Not picked. Made.

The colours I kept seeing were… specific. Pure, but not flat. More like… distilled. An intense sort of mauve maybe. A verdant olive green. Something luminous that wasn’t just about light, but about presence. Not quite magic – magic sounds rehearsed – a quiet uniqueness. A subtle purity that holds.

It reminded me of teaching art – those moments when students are so immersed in the process they forget to clean their brushes. Not from laziness (necessairly), but absorption. And sometimes, yes, something interesting happens – a happy accident. But the colours I was seeing and reflecting on yesterday didn’t come from that. They came from the opposite. From care. From a kind of gaze where every brush is cleaned with intention, where the palette is respected, where the colour isn’t accidental. It’s chosen, adjusted, layered. Earned.

And I noticed that across all th0se pieces – the ones I was looking at yesterday. A consistent quality. As if they’d all been made from that kind of gaze.

There was a kind of luminescence running through them. And these little jolts of colour – these small, vibrant moments. Whether still life or landscape, there was a sense of being somewhere richly alive. Like Gauguin’s tropical fruit, but contemporary – less romanticised, more structurally clear.

Another thing I noticed: containment. Not in a naive or heavy-handed way, but in how the elements held their own space. Defined. Deliberate. Some works leaning towards pattern; others a conscious compositional edge. As if every part of the piece knew where it belonged.

Almost all of the works – though not quite all – were without people. I was only looking at five or six collectors’ selections though, so it’s not a sweeping statement. But still – a pattern.

 

I love portraiture – and personally love painting people. There’s something magnetic about the human form. But when it comes to contemporary art in the home… acquiring portraiture – that’s for a separate post. It can be complicated.

In these collections, the figure was either absent or implied. A gesture. A trace. A presence suggested rather than stated. Nothing overt. Nothing identifiable. Atmosphere, held.

Some of the pieces had a kind of sensory lift. Not tropical – that’s been overused into cliché. Not exotic either – that one’s worse. But something. A certain kind of heightened perception. “Spiciness” isn’t quite right either..
I might need to circle back and find the word.

They were landscapes, still lives, and quiet scenes – with that feeling you get when you arrive somewhere beautiful for the first time. That gentle jolt to the senses. Like stepping off a plane into heat, or walking into a fruit market you didn’t know you were looking for. Or even just setting things down on a kitchen table and noticing –  in that second – that the light is perfect.

 

 

They had that quality. Rich with natural beauty. Colour that was intense, sometimes luminescent. Or pearlescent. Something alive in the pigment. And really – why wouldn’t you want that energy in your home? Who wouldn’t want to live alongside that kind of scene? A quiet, life-affirming beauty. Those moments that stop you for just a breath – God, that’s beautiful.

And it’s not just the moment itself that’s been caught. It’s been heightened. Tuned. An artist has seen it – or imagined it – and then shaped it with care. Through their own vision, their hands, their choices. The materiality, the colour mixing, the composition. It all comes together like… an offering.

Not “craft” in the way the word’s sometimes used to diminish – but in the truer sense: ritual. Reverence. Attention. That’s what I was seeing across those works. 

 

 

 

I’ve been looking through the current collection – of paintings, sculptures, drawings – and pulled together a selection of artists. Some are the same artists I saw in those collectors’ histories. Others are new. All of them share something of the same atmosphere I was describing. They’re all different, of course. But there’s a thread. Intention. Beauty. Presence.

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