Available to buy through Art UK
Why would anyone wish to take up the strange and beguiling practice of making art in the twenty-first century? It is hard and seems to go against all sense and reason.
In this new book, 75 artists working across the UK have been interviewed about their day-to-day experience of making art. Where do they get their inspiration from? Which artists inspire them? How do they feel AI and social media is impacting the landscape for creativity?
Artist to Artist explores their daily struggles, examines how they fund their practice and looks at the role of art education and the dramatic rise of women in the field over the course of the past 50 years.
Interviewed artists all have works in The Priseman Seabrook Collection and they include former Slade School of Art Professor Andrew Stahl, European Sovereign Painters Prize winner Susan Gunn, 54th Venice Biennale exhibitor Marguerite Horner, East London Painting Prize winner Nathan Eastwood, John Moores Painting Prize winner Nicholas Middleton, and Contemporary British Painting Prize winners Cathy Lomax (2016), Narbi Price (2017) and Lesley Bunch (2022).
Format: Hardback, thread sewn. Pages: 428. Size: 23 x 15 cm. Includes 58 full colour photographs of artists and their studios
What the critics say:
Michael Peppiatt
A new force has been quietly and effectively building up in the British art world over the last couple of decades. It’s called the Priseman Seabrook Collection and it has not only stimulated interest in contemporary British art by sending out informative newsletters about a wide range of talented artists at work in the UK but assembled an impressive collection of their works. This has in turn been exhibited in museums across the world. The whole remarkable undertaking continues to go from strength to strength, since they are now about to publish a book of interviews with the artists they have collected.
There can be no better way of exploring the hugely talented and diverse contemporary British art world than by following the Priseman Seabrook’s admirable initiative.
Anna McNay
Reading these interviews is like eavesdropping on the most fascinating dinner-table conversations – the kind where you’re so rapt that your hors d’oeuvre gets cold.
Nicholas Usherwood
Too often contemporary writing about artists and artistic practice is concerned with the ‘whats’ and ‘whens’ of the work, too often just shoe-horning it into pre-established theoretical and art critical frameworks. Much more mysterious, and therefore infinitely more interesting, and to the point, are the ‘whys’ and ‘hows’ of making art. At heart it is, at least among the artists I have admired and written about, an intensely solitary and private activity, the painting or drawing more a contemplative act aimed at a private understanding than a gesture made for public consumption and admiration. All of which makes the basic precept of this fascinating 75 book ‘Artist to Artist’ series – with one artist interviewing another – so wonderfully refreshing and so hugely revealing. Artists recognise this loneliness intuitively and, as this series of interviews makes refreshingly clear, that there are as many ways of making good art as there are good artists.