Lovers of Sky Arts’ Portrait Artist of the Year will be familiar with Kate Bryan. The art historian and curator is also one of the judges who, for more than a decade, have been murmuring things such as “painterly”, “narrative” and “bold use of colour”, and turning the show into a surprise hit. That it is so compelling is a surprise. You are, after all, watching actual paint drying.
In fairness to Bryan and her fellow judges, Artist of the Year has gone a long way to taking some of the pretentious sting out of art, a feat she is aiming to extend with How to Art. Bryan writes engagingly and convincingly, and yet it is tricky to fathom who her actual intended audience may be.
Chapters range from How to Find Art, to How to Speak About Art You Do Not Like, to segments on taking children to galleries, and making art at home. She goes into buying, and the nitty gritty of how artists make a living, all enlivened with illustrations by UK artist David Shrigley, the success of whose own career has been helped by his highly accessible style.
There is nothing hard-going about How to Art, and Bryan pulls off the depth-of-knowledge-worn-lightly thing well; although her advice on having a more cultural dog: “find a name that resonates […] Rothko, Kahlo, and Riley all have great charm” is a bit on the barking side. The main problem is that by trying to reach all people, plenty misfires. There are genuine moments of “Yes. This”, such as when she writes on falling in love with an art work: “I am not just looking at something I see every day; I am connecting with the first feeling it gave me when I saw it and loved it so much that I was prepared to buy it.”
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But if you’re swept away by the advice on building a career, you’re very unlikely to need to learn about how to go to your local museum. On the other hand, if you genuinely do require emotional support to go to a gallery, Bryan’s advice could be the thing to help. Will it stop some art people being multi-syllabically affected? No, but it may give you the tools to ignore them.
