A Collector’s Note - June

The Diary of an Art Advisor

A short selection drawn from the works I’ve been sharing with collectors over the past few weeks.

This month’s group moves between four very different positions: a small, dreamlike painting by Kirsty Budge; a watercolour by Edmond Brooks-Beckman, whose work has gathered serious momentum since the Royal College of Art; an early framed pastel by Charlotte Edey, made before her recent international profile expanded; and a late painting by Clyde Hopkins, from the estate, made after the turbulence of the 1980s had been compressed into something sharper, flatter and stranger.

At first, they may not seem an obvious group. They come from different generations, geographies and circumstances. Hopkins belongs to a longer British history and is now being reassessed posthumously. Budge, born in Aotearoa/New Zealand and now working in Australia, brings a more hybrid, mythic and psychologically compressed sensibility. Brooks-Beckman and Edey are younger London-based artists whose practices have developed quickly, but in very different ways.

What connects the selection is not style, exactly. It is the feeling that each work turns a small space into something charged. A framed painting becomes a theatre. A watercolour becomes an unstable structure of stain, abrasion and light. A pastel drawing becomes an object, shrine, threshold and image all at once. A late abstract painting becomes a head, a mask, a façade or the memory of a figure. None of these works relies on scale to announce itself. Each asks for a different kind of attention.