I Want Good Art But I Don’t Know Where To Start and What Is An Emerging Artist Anyway?

Let me paint a picture for you and see if it resonates. You are in your mid-late thirties. You have recently moved into a big-kid house. The last vestiges of your first-apartment furniture and IKEA art have finally made it to the curb for garbage-pickup day. You are ready to buy real furniture (that withstands ketchup and greasy fingers, obvi) and some “good art.” The furniture piece is easy enough to find on your own. But the art, well that is another story.

You have some money to spend on said art, but not hundreds of thousands, or even tens of thousands of dollars. Where does one find GOOD art under $10,000, you ask.

HERE! RIGHT HERE! You did it. You solved the mystery. You came to the right place. Everything on this Substack will be under $10,000. I will bring my 16 years of experience in the art world and multiple art history degrees (yep, two of them. See, Dad, there IS commercial value in an art history degree!) to bring you the best art from around the world that is wallet-friendly, high-quality work that will stand the test of time. It will inspire you, challenge you, spark interesting conversations with your guests, and probably make your friends jealous. You’re welcome.

Subscribe to read on for my very first suggestion…

On my phone, in a secret (not really secret) folder, I keep a treasure trove of artists I love who are just hitting their stride. We call them emerging artists. It is difficult to define or categorize emerging artists. They are usually on the young side, but not always. They are usually relatively recent MFA grads, but sometimes they took time away after finishing school and are coming back to being a working artist. They probably have a few gallery shows under their belt, maybe a solo show. Perhaps they were in New American Paintings (a gold mine of emerging artists, btw. You should subscribe to the magazine and put them on your bookshelf if you really want to look like you know what you are doing.)

What emerging artists typically have in common is that they have found their voice and a visual language to communicate what it is they want to say. They have a few bodies of work that demonstrate both their technical prowess and thematic relevance; and the people who need to have started to notice them. And they are probably still starving, so we should support them.

If we are talking about artists in terms of investments, emerging artists are the venture capital gambles. Some will hit it big and be generation-defining. Some will make it enough to support themselves. And some will peter out into oblivion. But the work they are making now is awesome and worth buying because it resonates with YOU!

Let’s talk about Katherine Qiyu Su, for example, because a very smart client just bought one of her paintings and she is in the current exhibition Blue Hour at Phillips. Katherine was featured in the Annex at Half Gallery in New York in August 2024, her US debut, and had another solo show earlier in the year. She has been in quite a few group shows in London and Italy. She got her MFA in London in 2023. And she has something really interesting to say and a novel way of saying it. I LOVE it already! But let’s look:

Whoa! High visual impact, right?! Katherine’s work is all about the human experience with reality and memory. Where is the line between what we remember to be true, what we know to be true, and what actually happened? How do we trace these intangible memories? As someone who used to memorize her entire day’s worth of homework and never write a single thing down but now will forget to breathe if she does not write it down, this work really hits home. Here are a few more awesome paintings:

If I were standing in front of these paintings and knew nothing about them, here are five things I might say about them:

1. I love her use of complementary colors to emphasize the contrast of her explosive brushwork. (Thanks grad school.)
2. These intimate moments of line work punctuate the large sweeping swaths of color.
3. The exposed bare linen demonstrates where we started and reifies the journey to this final frenetic composition.
4. The composition is abstract but I feel like I am really looking at something. But I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like a word on the tip of your tongue.
5. This painting makes me want to shift in to high gear and get $h*t done!

Katherine’s large canvases sell for about $8000-9000 and smaller ones (about 35×28 in) sell for under $5,000. I have access to a couple of available so hit me up if you’re interested!