“I discovered a whole new wrinkle. I’ve been very lucky with the gallery in Vancouver – except for those last two paintings of course – for a lot of places though, art is just a business. So this is the latest scheme: normally, a gallery pays its artists fifty or sixty percent of the sale price of a painting. But, that’s not enough anymore, apparently. Some of them have started importing large oil paintings by classically trained Chinese and Russian painters. The artists get paid pennies on the dollar, of course. Perhaps they make a couple of hundred bucks – who knows really, in those places most people seem to have to work for slave labour wages – then the gallery sells a piece for $10,000, say, and makes a nice $9,800 profit. If they sell the work of a local artist, it’s a standard split, so the profit is a fraction of what they make on a container load of stuff from China. ‘It’s economics, David.’ They were upfront with me, at least. I suppose I should be thankful for that, but it all seems very short-sighted, the gallery owner who told me this actually owns a couple of my paintings. I would have thought he might want to promote the artists he collects himself at least.”

    “That is a bit cut-throat, isn’t it?” [said Andy]

    “There are galleries that build artist’s careers – they’re like investment advisers
really – and then there are the ones that are in it for a quick buck. So I’ve been trying really hard to get to the States, but things keep happening in Canada to pull me back...”