What I Look For When I Visit a Gallery

I don't walk a gallery looking for my favourite painting in the room. I'm looking for the one I can't stop thinking about on the walk home — and those are rarely the same piece. The favourite is usually the most immediately impressive: the largest canvas, the boldest colour, the technique that makes you understand, instantly, how much skill it took. The one that stays with you is often quieter, and it takes longer to notice why it won't let go.

When I visit an exhibition, I try to walk the whole space once quickly, almost carelessly, before I let myself stop in front of anything. That first pass is just to notice which pieces pull my attention without my permission — the ones I find myself turning back toward before I've consciously decided to. Then I go back to only those, and I give each one much longer than feels reasonable. Usually five to ten minutes, just standing, before I read a single wall label.

I do this deliberately, without the label, because I want to know what the piece is doing to me before I know anything about the artist's intention, their materials, or the market context that a gallery might want me to have in mind. A painting that only works once you've read the accompanying text is usually leaning on the text. The ones I trust are doing their work visually, before language enters the room at all.

I pay close attention to where I'm standing when a piece finally clicks. Some paintings only resolve from three metres back, once the brushwork dissolves into an image. Others reward getting uncomfortably close, so close a gallery attendant starts watching you carefully, because the real work is happening in the texture of the paint itself, not the overall composition. Knowing which kind of painting you're looking at tells you something about how it was made, and how it wants to be seen.

I also notice what a piece does to the art around it. A genuinely strong painting can make its neighbours on the same wall look slightly worse by comparison — not because those neighbouring pieces are bad, but because the strong piece has reset your expectations for what the room can do. That's a useful, if slightly unfair, test. The paintings that survive being seen next to something excellent are usually the ones worth remembering.

By the time I leave, I've usually forgotten most of what was in the room. But there's always one piece I'm still turning over hours later, on the drive home, in a way I can't fully explain. That's the one I go back to see again if I can. It's also, honestly, the only kind of response I hope for from anyone standing in front of my own work.