Every week on Instagram, I post a couple of images of work I love by other artists. This is important to me because I think artists should support each other, and also to share with those who follow my feed the things that I love, the works that move me.

I deliberately focus on current practicing artists, and avoid well-known ones or those with a large social media following as having this focus means I have to always be on the look-out for things to discover. I am open to be moved or mesmerised, to be surprised and get hooked, and this is really something I enjoy. I am constantly scrolling social media and art magazines for new art to look at, not simply to inspire and grow my own practice, but for the pleasure  of falling in love over and over again.

I often look back through the artists I have previously featured in my weekly posts, or through the rest of the art I catalogue and save on social media, and it is interesting to see the variety of work I cherish. Images that can be bright and joyful or terribly dark, sober lines and explosions of colours, ultra realistic works and complete abstractions, high brow stuff and street art, you name it, I have saved some of it somewhere. I really don’t have a very set taste when it comes to art.

What makes the difference for me between the works that I simply “like” and scroll past versus those I collect and come back to, is that those I save don’t simply have visual appeal to them. There is something that connects me and draws me back to look at it over and over again and to want to share it with others. It is the “punctum” that Roland Barthes talked about in Camera Lucida (“La chambre claire”), the something that resonates, the detail that attracts or wounds as he says (“un détail qui m’attire ou me blesse”).

In fact, he talks about this even better in a Lover’s discourse (“Fragments d’un discours amoureux”), when he talks about the specificity of desire, of loving the way a lover widens his fingers when talking, when smoking, and exclaims: “that’s it, this is exactly that (that I love)!” (“C’est ça! C’est exactement ça (que j’aime)!”).

The art I save has the same effect on me. I may like the image as a whole, it may have nice colours or a beautiful composition, or I may “understand” it, in as much as I can place it in a wider context, cultural or biographical or narrative. 

But that is not really what matters. It is always a detail that captures me completely and pulls me back to it: there will be a gracefulness in the way a gesture is drawn, a strength or sensuality in the shape of a body, an emotion provoked by the composition or colours beyond their aesthetic qualities, a palpable atmosphere…

With artworks (as with people),  there is always a universality in what I (we?) fall in love with, but there is also always a very specific element on which this love anchors itself. And this detail doesn’t simply wait on the page to be discovered- it pulls me in, surprises me and demands my attention.

It is what makes art an obsession, and why some works resonate so strongly with me. And so, I catalogue it and collect it, and I come back to it again and again, and I share it and I shout about it.