Where do I start?

After a decade in film, I've recently felt an overwhelming pull back to painting. There's something tribal in it, something primal and atavistic — it reaches back through time. At its core it's the act of rubbing pigment into a surface. A cave drawing, essentially, transposed onto paper.

My process is physical. I work on a very large scale: I unroll the sheet across the floor and climb onto it, so the work happens from above and within rather than from a distance. It becomes a relationship between me and the ground I'm painting on. And strangely, I find I can't push too hard — I'm wary of breaking the surface. There's a delicacy to how I handle it, which makes no sense, because nothing is stopping me from tearing the whole thing to pieces. But I already know I won't.

So that's that.

Recently I visited around ten galleries with Bert Gilbert, a fellow artist. We were filming our vlog, which is about art and artists, and the obstacles, frictions and walls we come up against in practice. So we walked into each space and asked the same question: "How do artists get in?"

The answer was uniform. "We don't take submissions."

Consider that for a moment. For an artist, this is the most tender, exposed part of the whole endeavour. Walking into these damn galleries is genuinely frightening, and the first thing out of their mouths is, "We don't take submissions." You're a gallery. You're a gallerist. You're a curator. Jesus Christ — open your fucking mind. Entertain the idea that someone has just walked through your door, entirely vulnerable, having made the effort — and meet them halfway.

More often than not, the response was: "Well, can you imagine if we responded to every artist who approached us?" And you think, what is wrong with these people? There is nothing wrong with responding to artists. I'm sure this piece will draw plenty of curators and gallerists insisting, "We don't have to," or, "We shouldn't have to."

Because when I pressed them — "So how do you find out about artists?" — the answer was: "They're recommended to us. We seek them out. We like to discover them."

But you're only ever looking in the same places, so you'll only ever discover the same people — the ones with connections. What about the artists without connections, who don't come from money? How will you ever find any of them?

There was one exception and that was Jealous Gallery.

Anyway, that's my blog for today.