Piet Mondrian

And having had such a strong figurative training at art school, in fact, we were forbidden to submit abstract paintings for our final folio.

It was still quite traditionally tied to Cezanne, Matisse, that sort of thing, but certainly not Rothko or Barnett Newman or, you know, other sort of art that you could be interested in or Mondrian or people like that.

And I think By the time I'd finished my art course, I really didn't know where I wanted to start.

But what had always intrigued me was particularly Mondrian and Kandinsky were the two artists that I looked at their work and thought, I can't understand this.

And instead of thinking, because I can't understand it, it probably isn't any good, which is the sort of arrogance of students, I turned it around and thought, because I can't understand it, there's probably a lot in it and I'm missing it.

So I read about them and I looked at as many illustrations as I could find of their work and sort of slowly began to see that there was something there that I was really interested in.

Which was still by Kirk Van Houten somehow.

The Mondrian-style painting, too, where the family was made as

blocks.

Yep.

Like you can do that.

Like you can work with the grid, but you have to deal with Mondrian.

Right.

So you can do that.

So I think the launch was a good time.

When art was growing in size and getting more popular, back in the Impressionist or modern art, you won't find any large Mondrians, for example.

You look at Mondrian, they're typically pretty small.

And with contemporary art, art got to be much, much bigger.

you're coming from an artist that does classical sculptures point of view, and you're coming from a collector that is very open to all genres.

And when you mentioned earlier about your research, you researched their life, their whole development from like Mondrian going right through from classical landscape right through to lines, you know, that it's like Picasso started off with realism all the way to cubism, that development.

um is all part of the uh provenance yeah so interesting really interesting now that was um

yeah

the barton del rey but i know that she kind of gets it out of her dreams yeah so you can still create a story of the painting even if there is nothing behind it but you can use your imagination but if there is no imagination if there is no authenticity and crazy mindset so we i guess artists have to be a little crazy little genius you know like all these ingredients um so if if it's not there even if you grade a painting you can see you know like the of course there are different tiers of collectors also in terms of understanding some people just collect to hang a nice picture on the wall you know some people

match the color scheme of the sofa

yes some people buy a 15 000 are to match the color of the sofa and some collectors they look for geniuses you know and it could be and it could be you know like like Mondrian or something incredibly simply looking stuff or some weird weird stuff but when you see it you know you know it's like it's like you're talking to each other you see the level of intellect with which it's painted and you can see the master the maturity the connoisseurship it brings that you drain out of it when you look at it you know as a collector so it's kind of it's kind of those things and is a sort of this is how you seen, this is how your art is seen, this is what collectors get out of it, the feed.

The feed, the imagination, and for me, I don't even have to like art, you know, it just has to create some sort of emotion and like has to bother me, you know.