Blackbird Rook

28/08/2026

Gabriella Day’s paintings are built through accumulation, interruption and revision. Scraps of paper, fabric, photocopies and studio detritus become part of the painted surface, with colour and form emerging through the process rather than being planned in advance. The result is work that feels provisional and resolved at the same time: part collage, part painting, part record of its own making.

Images:

Thinking about the painting but hoping to catch the drips, 2026
Acrylic, oil, metal paint and collage on canvas
190 × 120 cm

Like Twister, but backwards, 2025
Acrylic and collage on canvas with wooden frame
150 × 200 cm

Sheer Mesh, 2025
Acrylic and collaged fabric on canvas
115 × 232 cm

GREY, 2025
Oil and collaged fabric on canvas
122 × 92 cm

27/08/2026

I was glad to see Kim Córdova mention my piece ‘Qualified for Nothing’ in Boston Art Review’s sharp account of the labour crisis in arts publishing and the wider art world. Artists and writers produce plenty of value... sadly, nearly all of it benefits someone else.
https://www.bostonartreview.com/read/artwonk-arts-journalism-and-future-of-media-august-19-kim-cordova-pubpolicy

BAR hit the road on the 2026 journalism conference circuit, attending convenings hosted by Investigative Reporters and Editors, Momus, and the Knight Foundation.

23/08/2026

Artists are happy to discuss failure, but being seen trying is more embarrassing. It means following up and admitting that you would quite like something to happen.

This newsletter looks at the effort artistic careers require, why ambition must be worn invisibly and how to tell persistence from pressing on a closed door.

https://blackbirdrook.substack.com/p/the-fear-of-being-seen-trying?r=20xg0r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

CreativePractice ArtWriting BlackbirdRook

23/08/2026

Justin Mortimer, Work on Paper, 2024–2026
Oil, pastel and crayon on paper
42 × 34.5 cm

From Material Witness, a series of works in which bodies and images are cut, joined, obscured and revised. Mortimer draws on the fractured visual language through which we now encounter the world: cropped photographs, unstable evidence and images separated from their original context.

Figures emerge and disappear. A gesture might suggest care, violence, exhaustion or escape, but its meaning never quite settles. The paper itself becomes a witness, carrying seams, stains, erasures and contradictions.

Material Witness brings together fifteen works on paper made between 2023 and 2026.

Justin Mortimer

23/08/2026

Jim Cheatle
Gunther Aberbach, 2024
C-Type print on Fuji Crystal Archive Maxima Matt
23 3/5 x 18 9/10 in / 60 x 48 cm
Editions 1-15 of 15 + 2AP

THE FORGOTTEN MASTERS

Gunther Aberbach, one of nine entirely fictional artists created for Jim Cheatle’s The Forgotten Masters.

Each artist is given the apparatus of a real career: studio portrait, biography, exhibitions, quotations, scandals and institutional approval. Aberbach appears surrounded by fluorescent hoops, dressed with the persuasive authority of someone we feel we ought already to know.

The series plays with how easily artistic reputation can be manufactured, and how quickly invention begins to look like art history once it has the right image, the right story and someone authoritative standing nearby.

Jim Cheatle

23/08/2026

Artists are happy to discuss failure, but being seen trying is more embarrassing. It means following up and admitting that you would quite like something to happen.
This newsletter looks at the effort artistic careers require, why ambition must be worn invisibly and how to tell persistence from pressing on a closed door.

https://blackbirdrook.substack.com/p/the-fear-of-being-seen-trying?r=20xg0r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

20/08/2026

My latest column is up at PLASTER.
This month: should you start making more commercial work if the work you care about isn’t selling? Or is that the beginning of a compromise you’ll come to regret?

A question about money, repetition, integrity and the difficult business of trying to make a living from art.

Read it now at plastermagazine.com Plaster

Blackbird Rook

19/08/2026

Most corporate art is bought to fill a wall. A cultural strategy begins when people start noticing what is on it.
In the paid edition of Blackbird Rook, I’ve set out the questions I use to distinguish an organisation that owns art from one that has developed a real relationship with culture.
Read the full piece and become a paid subscriber.

https://blackbirdrook.substack.com/p/the-art-in-the-lobby-is-not-a-cultural?r=20xg0r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Image: Jim Cheatle
Victor Vesala, 2024
C-Type print on Fuji Crystal Archive Maxima Matt
63 × 51 cm with frame included
Editions 1-15 of 15 + 2AP

See Jim Cheatle’s series The Forgotten Masters at Blackbird Rook on artsy. Jim Cheatle’s The Forgotten Masters is a series of nine portraits of entirely fictional artists, each given a convincing biography, career, critical history and artistic mythology. Drawing partly on the spirit of William Boyd and David Bowie’s Nat Tate, the project plays with how readily we accept the stories that surround artists, and how much those stories shape our understanding of the work itself. By inventing artists who feel as though they ought to have existed, Cheatle gently exposes the way art history, reputation and the idea of the “great artist” are constructed, embellished and continually rewritten.

16/08/2026

A childhood story about a yak, a painted cave and the artist’s favourite excuse: I’ll begin properly when I have the right materials - a piece about expensive paint, “hangover paintings” and making work before the conditions are “perfect”.

Read the full piece at Blackbird Rook on Substack. Link in Blackbird Rook bio

16/08/2026

Clyde Hopkins
Untitled - Barna, 1990
Oil on Paper
70 x 50.5cm

Clyde Hopkins