Blackbird Rook

17/06/2026

Edmond Brooks-Beckman’s Dampened Voices has been built through addition and removal - thick oil paint laid down, carved into, scraped back and occasionally allowed to fall away. In reproduction, you can read the composition. In the flesh, it becomes much stranger. Paint gathers into ridges and small overhangs, while the central passage resembles mineral deposits or lichen spreading across a wall. It feels part landscape, part ruin, part living thing.

For this week’s One Piece Worth Seeing, I’ve written about the painting’s physical presence, its unstable imagery and the way earlier decisions continue to press through its surface.

Read the full piece on Substack - link in bio.

https://open.substack.com/pub/blackbirdrook/p/one-piece-worth-seeing-e98?r=20xg0r&utm_medium=ios

ContemporaryArt

17/06/2026

Clyde Hopkins’ works on paper aren’t sketches or just rehearsals for larger paintings. They’re complete works in their own right - dense, unruly and extraordinarily alive. Across the 1980s and 1990s, Clyde used paper as a place to think through paint at speed: pouring, scraping, staining and drawing into the surface, allowing colour and structure to collide.

Some are dark and politically charged, others comic and awkward. All of them carry the unmistakable sense of a painter finding out what a painting might become while he’s making it.

The new book, Clyde Hopkins: Paintings on Paper, brings this remarkable body of work together for the first time, with texts by Matt Lippiatt and Joan Key, and a conversation between David Ryan and David Sweet.

Available now:
https://blackbirdrook.com/store/clyde-hopkins-paintings-on-paper

There is a link in Blackbird Rook bio

Image: Trim, 1990, Oil on Fabriano paper, 76 × 56.5 cm, 297 × 22¼ in.

Clyde Hopkins Marilyn Hallam

17/06/2026

Justin Mortimer is a painter who distrusts finish. A figure appears - a few exact marks - then gets rubbed back, interrupted, partly removed. Stopped before it becomes too sure of itself. The works on paper carry the evidence of this: pasted fragments, joins between sheets, stains, passages of colour caught somewhere between arriving and disappearing. What you get is the immediacy of drawing with the material ambition of painting. These aren’t studies toward something else. They’re where the thinking is most exposed.

A selection of recent works on paper is available through Blackbird Rook, from £2,000 + VAT. Link in bio Blackbird Rook.

https://www.artsy.net/partner/blackbird-rook/artists -mortimer

15/06/2026

Maxwell Mustardo’s sculptures look soft and swollen, like a spongy, inflated sea creature… dredged up from the ocean. The surfaces seem porous and weightless, but in reality, they’re really pleasingly heavy, solid, substantial ceramic objects that feel very different from how they first appear. That tension between appearance and object is part of what makes them so satisfying. They’re funny and strange without losing the long history of the vessel underneath.

I love the latest group of available works. Do contact me for details.

Maxwell Mustardo

15/06/2026

This week’s newsletter is about the small humiliations, evasions and failures of grace that make people close the door on the art world. The pressure to decide quickly. The price that isn’t quite clear. Buying art involves money, of course, but the money arrives wrapped in pride, curiosity, embarrassment, trust and the desire not to feel like an idiot.

Most collectors won’t complain when that trust is mishandled. They’ll just spend their money somewhere else.

“They’re Not Getting My Money” is now on Substack.

https://open.substack.com/pub/blackbirdrook/p/theyre-not-getting-my-money?r=20xg0r&utm_medium=ios

10/06/2026

This week I’ve written about Zoe Spowage’s Sweet ball and socket joints - a large, strange, beautifully unstable painting that seems to move like a body.

Spowage’s work sits somewhere between theatre, cartoon, figuration and bodily farce. The figures stretch, slip and half-disappear. Faces become masks. Lines don’t simply describe things - they test them, worry them, tease them into being.

What I like about this painting is that it feels light without being slight. It has the looseness of wash and the force of something less polite. The black spirals in the lower half stop the whole thing becoming too pretty. They make it dirtier, funnier and more bodily.

The title is perfect too: Sweet ball and socket joints. Anatomical, comic, tender and faintly wrong. It understands the body not as a fixed subject, but as something moving, performing, misbehaving and refusing to settle.

Spowage is currently showing in Dance Out at the Royal West of England Academy, and this painting feels very much part of that wider interest in movement, performance and the social body.

Full piece on Substack - link in bio.

09/06/2026

The David Byrne of Painting
Clyde Hopkins was never an artist who sat neatly inside the usual account of British abstraction. That is partly because the usual account is too tidy. It likes movements, schools, clean lines of influence. It prefers artists to stand still long enough to be named. Hopkins never quite did that. His work is too agile for it - too funny, too musical, too odd, too formally alert.

Peter Doig recently remembered first visiting Hopkins’ studio at Chelsea. Clyde asked him whether he was “the David Byrne of painting” - the kind of painter, he said, who might paint “a giraffe playing a saxophone.”

It is a perfect Clyde remark. Absurd, funny and strangely exact.

It also says something important about the work. Hopkins’ paintings are off-centre, but never casual. They are playful, but never lightweight. They have humour without flippancy, structure without stiffness and a pictorial intelligence that keeps shifting between improvisation and control.

The new book, Clyde Hopkins: Paintings on Paper, focuses on a remarkable body of work made between the early 1980s and the mid 1990s. These works are not side-notes or preparatory studies. They are where much of Hopkins’ intelligence is at its most immediate. They show an artist thinking through painting without pomp or grandstanding. Alert, inventive, witty, restless and exact, they have the rare quality of seeming both highly worked and suddenly found.

There are painters whose work seems, in retrospect, to have been waiting for the right moment to be seen again. Not because the paintings have changed, but because the surrounding noise has. Hopkins now looks less like a marginal figure in a familiar story and more like an artist who was making his own story all along.

Clyde Hopkins: Paintings on Paper is part of a wider attempt to let him be seen properly again - not simply as an overlooked British painter, but as a singular artist with his own pictorial language: eccentric, rigorous and inventive.

Available from the blackbirdrook.com store. Link in bio


With thanks to

07/06/2026

The new Blackbird Rook piece is about hesitancy. Not the practical kind - although money, space and confidence all play their part - but the deeper hesitation that often sits beneath collecting. The collector who keeps looking but never quite begins. The person who visits exhibitions, saves images, admires work from a safe distance, then waits for the moment when they'll know enough, feel certain enough, or be less likely to make a mistake. But until you buy, your taste is still theoretical. Still Becoming a Collector is about that strange pause before action.

https://open.substack.com/pub/blackbirdrook/p/still-becoming-a-collector?r=20xg0r&utm_medium=ios

06/06/2026

Starting an art collection can feel oddly intimidating. Galleries, prices, editions, etiquette and paperwork can make a simple pleasure feel complicated.

Watch the full video on YouTube and explore the rest of the Diary of an Art Advisor playlist.

This playlist brings together video essays adapted from The Diary of an Art Advisor, the Blackbird Rook Substack newsletter. These pieces are written from in...

06/06/2026

This is a really compelling Justin Mortimer work on paper. What I love here is the strange collision between speed, delicacy and pressure. The image feels as if it has been assembled from fragments that don’t quite belong together: small yellow figures, a heavy dark band across the top, passages of red, blue and black, then all this pale, rubbed, open space below.

Mortimer is brilliant at this. He can make a figure appear with extraordinary economy, then leave it vulnerable inside a world that seems to be shifting around it. The bodies here are not fully described, but they are intensely present. They feel exposed, almost lit from within, while the surrounding marks suggest screens, architecture, weather, interference or some broken memory of place.

The work is made across three sheets - the joins remain visible, so the image never becomes too seamless. It has been constructed, interrupted, revised and held together just enough.

These works on paper are not minor studies. They are where Mortimer’s thinking is at its most immediate: the speed, the doubt, the skill, the refusal to over-explain.

Justin Mortimer
Work on Paper, 2026
Oil, pastel and crayon on 3 sheets
22 1/5 × 15 7/10 in | 56.3 × 40 cm

Available through Blackbird Rook. Link in bio