Over the last couple of years, writing weekly newsletters for Blackbird Rook has been one of the quiet pleasures of my working life. Not exactly life-affirming - that would be overstating it - but certainly sustaining. A way of thinking out loud, of staying in dialogue with artists, collectors and writers, and of keeping ideas moving rather than letting them harden. What I’ve enjoyed most is when those conversations about contemporary art brush up against other parts of life - politics, work, money, time, ageing, attention - and remind me why art still matters beyond its immediate bubble. Why it has a place in the everyday rather than just on walls or in PDFs.
That said, the core of Blackbird Rook hasn’t changed. The main business is still working closely with contemporary artists, and helping interested, curious collectors find work that feels credible, alive and worth living with. When I first met Marilyn Hallam, and then spent time with a lifetime of her paintings laid out in her studio, it was one of those rare moments of clarity. The same was true when she invited me to look properly at the stored work of her late husband Clyde Hopkins - an extraordinary volume of work, much of it unseen, and clearly museum quality. Those moments sound like clichés when art advisors talk about them, but occasionally they really do happen - work that simply needs care, context and a way back into the world. I’ve loved working with Marilyn and the Clyde Hopkins estate over the last few years for exactly that reason.
More recently, I’ve had that same jolt of recognition encountering the paintings of Eric Banks, a painter based in upstate New York. His work presses all the right buttons for me - a kind of hard-won painterly intelligence that sits somewhere between the bruised humanity of Philip Guston and the moral weight and structural compression of Max Beckmann. These are paintings built slowly, revised endlessly, thick with decisions and reversals. Nothing flashy. Nothing performed. Just a sustained commitment to painting as a thinking process. It’s work that rewards time, and I suspect will go on doing so for a long while yet. If you’re looking, now feels like a very good moment to be looking closely.