Financial Times

Emerging talent on the line Read the full article online via The Financial Times The idea for New Blood Art, an online gallery for emerging artists, seeded itself in Sarah Ryan’s mind while she was at art school in the early 1990s. She knew there was an appetite for genuinely affordable artwork, yet she and her fellow art students were supporting themselves by taking part-time jobs in bars. “All our drawings were going in portfolios under our beds,” she says.

“But I couldn’t quite work out how to resolve that disconnect without the overheads of a physical space.” On the cusp of the millennium, with a world newly online, she realised the internet had become a viable way to help young artists sell work, and New Blood Art was launched in 2004. Each year Ryan scours art school graduation shows across the UK, and invites artists to show, exclusively, with New Blood Art. Currently there are about 150 names listed on the site, and around 50 new artists join each year. Artists who accept Ryan’s invitation, or make a successful submission to her, upload images of their work to the website along with a brief profile. Customers buy art directly from the website, and New Blood Art takes a 40 per cent commission...

A web-only sales platform allows the prices of the artworks to be kept low, for work to be available year-round and for more artists to be shown than would be possible in a normal commercial gallery. But, Ryan says, with disarming honesty, “I wasn’t at all sure if people would buy online, because, in truth, I didn’t feel like I would have done. There’s something about seeing work in the flesh, there’s some kind of energy about it that doesn’t translate online. So I’ve been consistently surprised by the fact that people do.” 

• Read the full article online via The Financial Times