This piece, one of the original Coffee Sack Series, was completed in 2015 after buying and using parts of a coffee sack purchased from a stall near the Brick Lane Gallery, London. It was sold six years later at The Artisan Gallery in 2023.

This piece was sold in 2016 to a buyer in Devon in the year it was painted.

WHAT IS SELLING TIME?

It seems to me that given these two examples, selling time is not really important. So often as artists or producers we strive for the next sale, as soon as possible. It can of course be ‘needs must’ when bills need paying and mouths need feeding. It can be this economic pressure can drive us away from our starting point, why we do this in the first place! We are not daft, we know it is happening but we are caught in the trap when selling time is crucial. Both these pieces are very precious to me marking important stages of development in my artistic journey. As a bolshy teenager in my student days, when hitchhiking to and from Preston to Lancaster College of Art, I seldom sold work, each piece was considered a part of my soul, not to be shared or lost, stashed away in a cardboard portfolio forever, hidden from scrutiny. Nowadays I have come to the realisation that if I can give pleasure through my work then I have no right to hold on to it for selfish reasons. So the question remains: How does the need to sell affect the work and mindset of the artist? He or She may question the reasoning behind their work or be given validity in the works saleability. The purchaser may well attribute a desire to sell with any number of positive or negative motives to selling. Those artist who are lucky, rich or well connected enough to not be interested in selling time are frequently the very ones for whom the issue is not a hindrance. I myself have come to the regrettable conclusion that Art, just as in life, was never an even playing field.