Standing in the Studio Before the Painting Is Finished
In short
A studio visit is not a privilege reserved for major collectors. It is now among the fastest-growing ways people buy art: in the 2025 collector survey behind The Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report, artist studio visits rose in attendance faster than exhibitions, biennials, auctions or fairs, and buying directly from artists more than trebled as a share of collector spending, to 20%. Asking is normal. For a first-time buyer, a short message is usually enough.
The number that settles whether asking is reasonable
The question underneath most hesitation is whether a studio visit is something a person is allowed to want. The market answered it plainly last year. Online sales, which peaked at a quarter of the global art market in 2020, fell to 15% by 2025 after three straight years of decline. The highest-value transactions went back to rooms with people in them. And within that shift, the studio visit outgrew every other kind of art event.
Madeline Lissner, Executive Vice President for the Global Fine Art Division at Sotheby's, describes what collectors are actually after: "Today's collectors are increasingly looking for deeper engagement with the worlds that surround the objects they acquire." Access, insight, and community, she says, sit alongside ownership rather than beneath it — experiences are "not separate from the core business – they are an extension of it."
Noah Horowitz, CEO of Art Basel, put the same principle behind a change to the fair itself: holding major works back until opening day, he says, "reinforced the value of in-person discovery and restored a sense of anticipation that cannot be replicated virtually."
Neither of those men is describing a perk for insiders. They are describing the ordinary direction of travel.
A finished photograph has already made your decisions for you
A photograph of a painting is a finished argument. Someone chose the light, the angle, the crop, and the moment. Standing in the room, none of that has been decided for you. You see the surface at the angle your own height gives you. You see where the oil went thin enough to let a charcoal underdrawing come back through, and where a passage was worked back over weeks until it settled.
You also see the things nobody photographs: the wall of canvases turned to face inward, the piece that has been sitting for four months because it has not agreed yet.
Kenneth Clark described his own encounter with a picture as a sequence rather than a verdict — impact first, then scrutiny, then recollection, then renewal on returning. A studio compresses that into an afternoon, because the work is there in quantity and unpolished.
Roland Barthes gave a name to the second part of it. Writing about photographs in Camera Lucida, he separated what a viewer can dutifully describe from the punctum — the accidental detail that pricks you, unbidden and personal. In a studio the punctum arrives faster, because nothing has been arranged to prevent it.
What to say, and how little it takes
There is no formal channel. A direct message to the artist is a legitimate opening; so is a line on a contact form saying you have been looking at the work and would like to see it in person. Name a rough window. Say whether you are travelling. Nothing more is required.
Two practical notes from artists themselves. Michael Stamm, a painter whose scenes tilt gently toward the surreal, sets the tone for the visit exactly right: "You are not doing an artist a favor by buying their work, you are, ideally, compensating them fairly for their labor. You and the artist are equals, irrespective of any possible financial transaction or difference in status." That cuts both ways, and it should relieve a first-time buyer of most of the anxiety.
And Danielle Orchard, on what not to do: "I would avoid any grand, sweeping assessments of the artist's work or its historical importance, because there's probably little time to unpack them." You are not expected to perform expertise. Reacting honestly to one canvas is worth more than a thesis about all of them.
Brendan Fernandes makes the case for treating it as a relationship rather than a transaction: "Multiple visits help in many ways… revisiting and touching base with an artist helps to get a clearer sense of their ways of working." A second visit a year later will show you things the first one could not.
Not being able to travel does not close the door
Most people who want to see a painting properly cannot get to the studio, and that is a solvable problem rather than a disqualification.
My own answer is a sequence of videos of the actual piece, shot in real daylight before it ships — the surface at an angle, the passages where the material behaves differently, the colour as it changes across the day. It is not a substitute for standing in the room, and I would not claim it is. It does carry the specific information a product photograph strips out.
Wisława Szymborska, in her Nobel lecture, said that whatever inspiration is, "it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'" That is a fair description of what is on the walls of a working studio at any given moment: a lot of unresolved decisions. Seeing them is most of the value.
What you are actually checking
Not authenticity, and not investment potential. Three things, all of which a studio makes easy:
Whether the surface holds up close. Photographs flatten. Some paintings that photograph beautifully have very little happening at eighteen inches.
Whether the practice is consistent. A room of work tells you whether the piece you liked is representative or an outlier.
Whether you want to keep talking to this person. Italo Calvino wrote in Invisible Cities that the task is to "seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." A collection made from that instinct ages better than one made from a list.
John O'Donohue put the plainest case for why any of this matters: beauty, he wrote, "is not a luxury; it ennobles the heart and reminds us of the infinity that is within us." A studio visit is a low-cost way of finding out whether a particular painter's work does that for you before money is involved.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to be an experienced collector to ask for a studio visit?
No. Studio visits grew faster than any other art event in the 2025 collector survey, and buying directly from artists — through a visit, a message, or a commission — now accounts for roughly 20% of collector spending. First-time buyers are a normal part of that.
Is it rude to ask an artist to see the studio if I might not buy anything?
It is not. A visit is an introduction to a practice, not a purchase commitment. What artists ask for is basic courtesy: arrive when you said you would, do not touch work without being invited to, and do not use the visit to negotiate around a gallery if one represents the artist.
What if I live too far away to visit in person?
Ask for video of the specific piece in real daylight rather than more product photographs. Angle, surface behaviour, and how the colour shifts across the day are the things a catalogue image removes, and they are the things a video can restore.
What should I actually look at when I get there?
Whether the surface rewards close viewing, whether the piece you liked is representative of the wider body of work, and whether the conversation is one you would want to continue in a year.
See available original work — or start a conversation about a commission.