The Artist’s Story

Standing alongside a roomful of my paintings, watching the public wander their way around, it has become more and more clear to me that people’s enjoyment of a painting is multi-factorial, and the significance of those different factors varies between each person.

I recently visited, full of expectation and hope, a museum exhibition of Gwen John.
It was full of information, plenty of people, but it was deeply dull.
On their own, the paintings were bland and uninteresting. They would qualify as technically competent, but I cannot imagine anyone wanting to buy one to enliven their walls. And yet - here we are 100 years later studying her life story. Maybe exhibitions in museums follow criteria that are different to those used by people deciding whether or not to buy a painting?

There is no doubt that some of the criteria used in the buying choice are very straightforward – they judge what they see in the most direct of terms – Do I like the image? Are the colours pleasant to look at? and - from experience of my own exhibitions: Would it match the sofa?

I have also observed that some spouses will often stand back and set aside their own opinions if their partner is keen.

Then there is the quality of the work – quality in the execution of the painting and in its’ presentation, to the extent that a good quality frame may be even more important whether or not I have succeeded in capturing the essence of the subject. 

I have come to appreciate that everyone has their own taste in colour and style. These preferences are clear in that way we dress – and, most important in choosing artwork – in how we furnish and decorate our homes. [To digress – I often wondered why anybody buys ‘art’ from huge department stores, but now I realise that it is solely to fill a space on a wall in their home and to do so in a way that ‘will go’ with everything else in the room. The image is probably mildly pleasant and of something at least vaguely familiar to the buyer, and it is non-controversial in any way: it is ‘safe’.] 

But that leads to the next factor – there should be something to say about the picture, or about something the picture says to the viewer, to give the new owners a response if anyone comments on it.
Western white men (like me, ‘wwm’) have dominated the world, including the art world for so long that rightly there is still a post-modern post-colonial trend to explore and appreciate art that comes from non-wwm sources. Any comment from (wwm) me on this is likely to come across as patronising. Suffice to say that I have spent many many hours of my corporate life promoting cultural change under the wholly inadequate banner of ‘equalities’; my personal mindset is very liberal, and I strongly believe that it was (and still is) wholly wrong for artists to have to fight harder for appreciation because of their personal profile. Which might all contribute to the interest in Gwen John - a woman in a man’s world.
My point here is –  artists must present themselves as a ‘brand’, and at this time there seems to be an imperative to include details of that personal profile so that the artwork can be categorised as being representative somehow of a particular genre as it was produced by someone of that profile.

Over the last 100 years, in the post-religious and increasingly democratic world, artists have had a great impact representing and stimulating the changes going on across society. Each wave of change has been accompanied or even stimulated by an ‘avant-garde’ art movement. (“avant-garde” literally means ‘ahead of the crowd’). Fantastically talented artists – Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock …..  who could each have earned a comfortable life producing extremely well painted traditional pieces, risked all by concentrating their effort on works which were not ‘safe’, which did not conform to the then-contemporary forms praised by critics.
The irony today is that the current contemporary forms praised by critics include experimental uniqueness and the equal but opposite backlash to that would be to revert to chocolate-box traditionalism. But that is such a densely populated field that an artist needs their own brand, backed with their own personal story in order to stand out. 

It has taken me some time for this realisation to dawn – my attitude up to then was that the picture should stand or fall on its own merit: why does it matter whether it was painted with a knife, a 6” brush or a chisel? Why does it matter if the artist comes from Pontypool, or is left-handed, or mad?
A piece of music is judged on its own merit – nobody is too concerned about the composer’s life story or whether or not the sounds it contains are ‘like’ something in the real world, as the music itself is now in that ‘real’ world.
We can hear that piece of music in our ears exactly as the composer intended, wherever we are in the world at any time.
But our experience of a piece of art, for most of the time, is restricted to a representation of it limited by the technology of a tiny screen – rather like first hearing that piece of music through someone humming it?

So, why are we obsessed with an artist’s story, their gender, race or the challenges they have faced in life?
Why does it matter if a landscape painting is a ‘good’ representation of a particular place? 

Part of the answer is about perspective or the viewpoint. Again, I initially understood those phrases to relate to the presentation of the picture – does the fading into distance work? Where was the artist standing? How about playing with different viewpoints of the same subject in the same piece?
I actually experience anger when a commentator proudly declares they have found the exact spot where Cezanne was standing when he painted a particular canvas - Cezanne worked hard to make the painting the important thing in itself, not as a capture of a view, especially as the view changes from one glimpse to the next as the sun and wind alter nature.

But of course these issues also relate to the artist. What I put into a painting is my interpretation of what I see and so it is ’from my point of view’. Then what I see and what I present has been channeled and filtered through my personal set of experiences and values and so (according to this notion), my work can justifiably be presented as coming from a right handed man (wwm) raised in Edinburgh and living in Pontypool. 

- I remain doubtful. I stay with a conviction that it is the painting that is judged, but the fact is that the artist’s story matters, even if my work looks nothing like that of any other artists’ of the same profile.

OR – could it be that actually it is quite difficult to distinguish really good art from the vast arrays of it that are being generated every day, and that hence those ‘peripheral’ issues are what makes an artist ‘hot’ and collectable?

30 June 2026