Happy New Year + How I fell in love with art

Happy New Year + a new essay!

Hello there subscribers, and Happy New Year!

Firstly, thank you so much for signing up to this part of the Substack. This year, I want to make it my mission to create more of a community on here, starting with you. In these paid newsletters, I am going to be sharing with you more personal thoughts, essays I’ve written, books I’m reading, art I’m looking at, additional podcast content, and more.

I want this part of my output to be where we can converse, and weigh in on thoughts about writers, artists, books, etc. so please do comment in the discussion box below. I am really excited to get going, so I thought I’d start by sharing a more personal essay: How I fell in love with art.

As a kid, I loved art. I even filled diaries to the brim with my thoughts and reviews of shows, old tickets, sketches, leaflets, and press releases. In a way, it’s very similar to what I do now with the Instagram, and now book, The Story of Art Without Men. Check out a picture of them here:

How did you fall in love with art?

Ok. Let’s get to it!

Katy xoxo

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How I fell in love with art

Art has always been an obsession since I was a child. My interest in it stemmed from my eldest sister who loved the subject. She is nine years older than me, so it was no surprise that as a six-year-old hanging out with their (much cooler) fifteen-year-old sister, I wanted to be just like her. She would take me to Tate Modern and Britain, the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. I remember visiting her when she lived in Florence, sitting in the Uffizi and her guiding me in sketching Botticelli’s Annunciation. I was only eleven, but I was mesmerised at how subtle an image could be, how delicate even the outline of an eyelid was, how a picture – despite being so still – could tell a story and survive hundreds of years, throughout wars, pandemics, new leaders and revolutions.  

I grew up in London and my parents, although not professionally associated with art, always encouraged museum visits. One of my earliest memories was a visit to Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. It was the cusp of the millennium and London was in the throes of excitement. Art, too, was being pushed to its limits. The work on view was Louise Bourgeois’s Mamam, a colossal eight-legged spider structure that dwarfed my tiny body. I’d never seen anything like it, especially in a gallery. It was both frightening and exhilarating (image below).

In 2002, we returned to the Turbine Hall this time to see Anish Kapoor’s red installation that swept almost the entirety of the cathedral-like space. To this day, I don’t know what the sculpture meant or represented – from quick a Google search, it seemed to have tested the ‘geometry generated by three rigid steel structures’ – but to eight-year-old me it looked like a sprawling gramophone (image below). Like great public art, its power was to challenge our human relationship with it. 

The paintings I liked as a child were by Bridget Riley. I loved anything that gave my eyes a dizzying sensation, that made me feel perplexed, or that shifted me out of my context and into another realm – something further enhanced in my teens upon visiting an Infinity Mirror Room by Yayoi Kusama. 

Of course historical and social context is important, but what always come first, for me, is how art makes us feel and how it speaks to us directly. I often begin my podcast by asking my guests – artists, writers, designers – what artworks speak to them because art is personal to every single one of us. The fact is that we all bring a unique perspective to a work of art, whether it was made today or 500 years ago. It’s this which makes art so exciting, so relevant, and such a springboard for discussion. In the words of Tracey Emin: 

“True art should resonate. It should make you feel. It’s not a picture. It’s not a thing. It’s not an object. It is a true entity. A true thing that has energy, that comes from somewhere. That’s what makes it art, and different from other things. It moves, it shakes, it has soul…”

As I entered my teens, my interest in art skyrocketed. The first time I took the tube by myself I went to see Chris Ofili’s retrospective at Tate Britain. I was bewildered by his use of elephant dung as a framing device and captivated seeing his Blue Rider series: dark blue canvases portraying the Trinidadian landscape (below). It was the first time I realised paint had a magic quality.

Before school, I would visit the basement of White Cube Mason’s Yard to watch Christian Marclay’s The Clock ­– a film (and working clock) that loops 24hrs with movie clips that tell the exact time. Saturday mornings were spent in the National Gallery, and the Royal Academy in the afternoons – the Summer Exhibition always being my favourite. I was very lucky to grow up in London at a time when entry to so many museums and galleries was free. 

I still have a collection of postcards and pretty much every leaflet of the shows I attended from 2008–2012, when I was aged 14 to 18. The collection fills five drawers in my parents’ house, that I have said, still to this day, they are under strict instructions not to throw away. 

When I was fourteen, I began my art diaries: black, leather-bound books that recorded my notes and exhibition reviews (albeit precociously written – everything went downhill when I got a laptop and discovered the thesaurus function). I would paint and sketch in them, and write down every thought and experience, which when reading them back today transports me to that exact moment. A favourite entry is visiting the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Summer Show and being blown away by how cool I thought the students were because they were blasting Mr Scruff’s ‘Get a Move On’ at their exhibition. 

One show that shaped my approach to art and what art could be was at The Museum of Everything, a nomadic museum which set up a show in a Primrose Hill townhouse in 2010 (image below). The show, curated by Peter Blake, brought together artists working beyond the mainstream. In my diaries I dedicated fourteen pages to my amazement at the “wondrous” and “thrilling” collection. It was also my first experience of a “non-white walled gallery” and, after looking at myself in a stretched mirror – an artwork that shows my body ten times as long as it should be – I simply write, “Bizarre”.

I moved schools for sixth form, and, for the first time, I could take Art History as a subject. I couldn’t believe it. We would spend our days in museums and analyse history through pictures. We looked at how artists recorded, through visual form, the changes in modernism, politics, wars, leaders, religions. But we also focussed on the individuals who shaped how we saw the world and how we now see it, bringing their own perspectives, telling stories their way. 

Nick Willing, as recalled in a recent podcast episode on his late great mother, Paula Rego, told me: “An artist is somebody who goes to places no one has ever been before and brings back a picture that nobody's ever seen. But everybody instantly recognises. And that is important. Because it helps us understand ourselves.”

I think it was learning the stories behind the artists and their artworks that helped me to look deeper. I began to find solace in art. Art became a companion and helped teach me about the world, but also myself. And the powerful thing about this is that it will never stop. As I visit and revisit artworks I first saw as a child, or in my teens, or 20s, they continue to show me something new. 

Art History was a subject I studied at university, loving every minute, but it wasn’t until after I left, that I began to realise there was so much I hadn’t been taught. I was confused – why didn’t I know the female equivalent to Botticelli? Why were almost all my diary reviews of male artists? For the most part, I was disappointed in myself that I’d not noticed earlier how skewed my knowledge was. So, I decided to do something about it. In 2015, I launched The Great Women Artist, and fell in love with art all over again.