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Photograph by Jennifer Silverberg
David Kent Richardson
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Photograph by Jennifer Silverberg
William Shearburn
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Photograph by Jennifer Silverberg
Philip Slein
Never buy art to match anything,” urges David Kent Richardson, interior designer and antiques dealer. “Buy it because you love it. I’d rather frame a child’s crayon drawing than buy decorator art from a big-box store. Always follow your heart. Sure, you’ll make mistakes, but that’s the only way to learn.
“And if you love it, it wasn’t a mistake.”
Reassuring words, but his first purchase was more like a steal. It was 1984, and Richardson was 29, living in Chicago. At a big weekend flea market, he came upon a series of six 18th-century Italian engravings of garden statuary. “They just spoke to me,” he says. “They were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. And I still own them—I’ve carried them around like Linus’ blanket.”
He’d seen similar prints in high-end antique galleries, and these were pristine: no foxing, good watermarks, the paper uncut. “I was pretty young and pretty stupid, but I knew enough to know they were good.” He snapped them up and paid three times as much to have them framed—simply, with gold leaf floated over wood. When he had the prints appraised, his instincts were confirmed.
A year later, art dealer William Shearburn was on the road, following the Grateful Dead. He’d just graduated from college with a history degree that wasn’t exactly pointing him to a job. A buddy suggested that they stop in a little town in north Georgia to meet an outsider artist named Howard Finster, who’d just painted Little Creatures for the Talking Heads. (It won Rolling Stone’s Album Cover of the Year award.)
“He was originally a preacher, then a bicycle repairman,” Shearburn says. “Then he had a vision to make art, and he set his tools in stone in his walkway. We spent the afternoon with him at Paradise Garden”—his folk-art sculpture garden—“and I bought my first piece of art. His paintings were all numbered, and they were primarily on cut-out plywood. Mine was a Coke bottle—he was fascinated by Coca-Cola’s presence in the South—and it had his signature primitive faces and angels and bits of religious text. I have it hanging at home still.”
Buying that single piece of art started Shearburn on a different road—collecting outsider art, entering the contemporary art world, opening a gallery. How can a single piece of art have such power?
“It fills a part of you that other things can’t fill,” he says. “I don’t want to say ‘spiritual,’ but—it feeds the soul in a way that other things can’t. Music can, and literature, and food—but art’s different, because it’s permanent. I can still look at this Howard Finster and have the memory of meeting him and being in that incredible place. And even though my tastes have changed dramatically since then, I can still see things in that piece that make me smile.”
Gallery owner Philip Slein was 23, studying painting at Mizzou, when he bought his first piece of art. He pretty much worshiped one of his professors, Frank Stack, a world-famous (by pseudonym) underground cartoonist who also painted landscapes of the Missouri River Valley. One in particular, a 2-by-3-foot oil painted at Easley cave (which is atop a bluff along the Missouri river near Columbia, Missouri) caught Slein’s eye. It reminded him of Corot—the short, evocative brushstrokes, the fluffy white clouds, the way late summer’s golden light bathed the hills and the river, whose surface reflected the sky’s blues and a hint of pink…
He’s still not sure where he found the money. “I know he gave me a deal. I was kind of an acolyte—we’d go out painting together.” If Slein had the painting in his gallery today—and not on his wall at home—it would command five times that long-ago price. “It’s that kind of generosity that can set the hook in your early days,” he says. “And the hook’s still in deep, and I’m still getting jerked around by it!”
His advice? “Start collecting now. Don’t think you have to wait until you become wealthy and successful. If you’re at a university and some of your friends are good artists, trade. Look on Cherokee [Street]; go to estate sales. You develop an eye. Look at books, at auction catalogs, on the Internet. Watch Antiques Roadshow. Make mistakes.”
What are these mistakes everybody says not to fear? “Buying a reproduction you think is an original is a big mistake,” Slein says, “and I’ve done it more times than I probably want to confess. Paying too much is a mistake. It stings a little. But at the end of the day, you only regret what you should have bought and didn’t.”
He’s still haunted by a model of a 19th-century ship, The City of St. Louis, that he could have plucked from a mansion off Lindell and didn’t. The consolation, Slein says, is that “there’s a river of stuff flowing, and there’s always another opportunity to find something. There’s so much stuff out there, especially in St. Louis. We’re older than the country, and we’ve been rich for 200 years.”
Kids don’t recognize the value of their parents’ stuff, Slein notes. “Everybody wants to be an artist. I’d like to see more people become collectors.” It’s not about money as much as creativity, he adds. Collectors recognize talent ahead of the pack—or dig it up when it’s been forgotten—and they can establish an artist’s name and amass an intelligent representation of that person’s work for tomorrow’s museums.
“It’s romantic to be the artist,” Slein concedes, “but collecting is a pathway to knowledge. I have learned so much. You buy an object on Saturday morning at a sale, and that night you’re on the Internet, learning.”
Shearburn’s advice to anyone interested in collecting is, he apologizes, “the same-old. Buy what you love. Buy what you can afford. Buy what feeds your soul—whether it makes you smile or makes you cry.” What you’re looking for is “the visceral reaction art can give you. I think everybody has it. Some people just don’t recognize it; they can’t get to that layer.”
They have to collect their thoughts first.
