Contemporary Collections

If you're an artist, you're passionate not only about your art, usually, but the big questions in life. The quotations that are in the catalog, which I think are more as a book, are a reflection of the way in which someone either thinks about their art and what it means for them or how their art is connected to life. When you get to know an artist, it's kind of a triangle. You fall in love with the work, then you meet the artist, and maybe you fall in love in a different way. My name is Ed Cohen and I'm eccentric. I read too much and I paint. I'm an artist. And your collector. Yeah. Trying to control his addiction. What got me going about collecting was seeing Lucian Freud's work and Michael Andrew's work in the Citizen Born Amisa show at the Whirl Academy. I saw a way of seeing the world in each of them that for me was different. With Lucian, there's this intense involvement with the person that he's drawing. I mean, incredibly intense. With Michael, there's this peacefulness and almost a sense of the eternal. In this watercolor, I just think it's incredibly evocative, that very British thing of shooting, the mysticism of having an endless amount of land. I can'think of a painting that Michael painted that wasn't in some way underneath, at least about the sacred. To me, he was sort of like a minister, you know, like very unusual mixture as a h And that, Anselm, in 1989, I had been in a bookstore and I had bought the complete poems of John Dunn and I gave him the book. And then he asked me about John Dunn because he didn't really know anything about him. We shared an interest in this, I went to Mexico City with him and went to the muse And he's just an extraordinarily interesting h The life of the artist is about being alive and vital and, The two Stephans I bought later, and as soon as I saw them, I would hope the same person buys them together. I've lived with them together. They speak to each other and they're very moving to live with. Bryce, I mean, this work is just unbelievably beautiful. The red is just, it sings. The structure is so tied to a stained glass window and his Cold Mountain series. There's poetry there. The Cold Mountain poems, they're about the eternal, the infinite and monastic life. The Cold Mountain poet is a bit Albert York. I mean, he's the true artist. He's painting out at the end of Long Island and he's just painting for himself. When you're with his work, The one that I bought from the Jackie Kennedy sale in a kind of strange way reminds me of Chardin because of its peacefulness. There's a silence in his work. I felt that York was really important because in his quiet life, he exemplified what it means to be an artist. As you can tell, I'm an emotional person for better or worse and I've learned from having the privilege of living with great art that you have a relationship with it and to me, what's really interesting is whether it's a sustainable relationship, whether you keep seeing and looking and relating emotionally and psychologically to the work. When I see something that really speaks to me, I want to live with it.