Matthew Collings

After writing a few posts about artists that I admire, I can’t continue without highlighting my favourite art writer, Matthew Collings. His books (Blimey!; It Hurts; Art Crazy Nation; This is Modern Art) are good reads, but his Diary column in Modern Painters is the bee’s knees. While some of the individual entries are strong as stand-alone pieces, the real value of the Diary lies in Collings’ regular and sustained campaign in support of visual pleasure, formal sophistication and colour literacy (and against sound bite-quality meanings, art historical amnesia and empty emoting). I strongly suggest reading the Diary in 6-12 month batches to get a sense of its collective potency. For a stand-alone piece, I recommend Collings’ essay “How Contemporary Art is Redeemed from Shallowness” (Modern Painters, March 2005).

In my opinion, Collings’ Diary remains the lone consistently valuable feature of today’s Modern Painters, which otherwise has been steadily fading for a few years. Their recent move to New York (from London) seems only to have made the magazine worse. If Collings departs, I’ll stop buying it.

Collings is also a painter and makes collaborative work with his partner Emma Biggs (see image above). Visit their website to see and read more. www.emmabiggsandmatthewcollings.net