New Blood Art: The Story - Part 7

London 2002 - 2004

Around that time, I met a man I had crossed paths with before - small overlaps, never a real meeting until then. He worked in the city, was a few years older than me, and had gone to that same boys’ school.

There was a buoyancy - a slight restlessness to his energy, a lightness that made you lean in. He listened and laughed easily.

We met for drinks in a bar in London and talked about our histories, the things we wanted to make. His grandfather’s entrepreneurial story, the ways things are built, carried forward. Somewhere inside that evening, I shared my idea about selling the work of emerging artists.

He listened, really listened. Asked questions. Loved it. The idea lit something between us. For me, giving voice to the idea, feeling it met without resistance - set it in motion toward existence.

Not long after, we moved in together in central London, and New Blood Art - although it didn’t have its name yet, became woven into our daily conversations.

We lived in different realms. His was business, the stock-market, and the urgency of needing to be in the city every morning before the market opened. Mine, was mornings in Richmond park with the ballet students, drawing the trees, making paintings and quiet conversations in the Nelson Room.

Meeting him introduced a daily urgency, a pace that wasn’t so natural to me. On reflection, it felt a little surreal.. moving faster than my psyche could easily integrate - though I moved with the energy, moved towards life, and to him.

Our mornings sometimes sparked the echo of an absurd memory - the time Rebecca and I climbed Mount Sinai, slightly delirious after a night of Dead Sea mishaps, only to lose all our luggage and end up, while sorting out emergency passports through the Embassy, staying overnight in a mixed hostel dormitory above a nightclub in Jerusalem.

It was a strange place to find ourselves, and whilst it felt relatively safe - we shared a top bunk bed and kept close. Absurdly, before dawn, someone with all the energy of a Sergeant Major marched into the dorm, shouting: get up! Get dressed! Get showered! Get moving! I was already on my feet and halfway down the corridor before I realised he wasn’t speaking to me.. He was training a boxer who was staying in the same dormitory (looking back, it’s incredulous on every level).

Anyway, back to the story..

After we met, the idea for New Blood Art moved into the world, began to live outside me. I found myself sharing about it more often, more freely, and it was always met with warmth. That encouragement mattered. I shared the idea with people around me, like my friend Sally, who also taught at the ballet school. During minibus trips between White Lodge and the Upper School in Covent Garden, she also encouraged me to build a website.

I began quietly researching, speaking with art tutors, asking if artists might trust the idea of showing their work online. Meetings began with a web developer in Islington.

Between lessons and in the evenings, the platform began to take shape, gathering itself into being. In those small A-level art classes, with the students working quietly around me, I’d let my mind orbit the idea and name it would take.

In 2004, I incorporated the company under the name Rare Online which was quickly changed to New Blood Art. At first, the word rare was about uniqueness, preciousness, rarity.

I hadn’t consciously connected rare to undercooked steak - or to anything bloody - but others had, and once it was pointed out, it got me thinking. Surprisingly, blood then became important, in a new, sacred context: blood as life, newness, origin, vitality, not as raw meat, but as a living pulse.

It shifted meaning, deepened, and became the right kind of blood - the real spirit of New Blood Art. The name Rare Online had collapsed the meaning into the wrong imagery: steak, blood, undercooked, not sacred or vital - something slightly grotesque and commercial.

What I was trying to build and to name was alive, vital, new blood, not half-dead meat. The blood in New Blood Art is the blood of life, vitality, origin, the real, living pulse of art being born.

New Blood Art May 4th, 2004.