Buying art - Dunedin School of Art

Rachel Allan, lecturer at the Dunedin School of Art, regularly buys works. “When I fall for a piece of work, it’s love, and then I know I have to have it," she says. Rachel Allan – along with many other experts – is a fan of art schools’ annual graduate shows. The prices are generally reasonable for pieces on which young artists have been working on all year.

Sir James Wallace agrees. He makes a point of attending the annual art school graduate shows every year. He says if you find a young artist whose work you connect with, you should try to develop a relationship with them and begin to buy their pieces regularly, which will “form a diary of their career and also contribute to keeping them afloat”. Allan – who has a limited budget – rarely buys art from dealers, devoting most of her time and cash to acquiring work from local Dunedin artists, students and fellow ­lecturers, or artists she has a personal connection with.

“The work I choose to live with in my home has to keep me very interested; it’s never mere decoration. I tend to go for work that is clever in some way and will hold my attention over the years. You can tell a lot about a person by what they choose to display in their home; it is an extremely intimate visual collage of who you are.”

Read more in the NZ Listener article online ...

Although most New Zealand artists who regularly sell work on the international stage are probably out of the reach for beginner collectors, it can be useful to follow their careers and, if you can, buy one of their works. Many Dunedin School of Art graduates fall into this category such as Jasmine Middlebrook (also mentioned in the Listener article).

(image below: Jasmine Middlebrook from 2010 SITE Exhibition)