Badge Art and Design Blog

Saatchi liked the art so much he bought the lot!

Hungover, I picked up the phone. It was the Saatchi gallery. Charles himself wanted to buy up my whole show - but with a £1,500 discount. Stunned, I agreed.

Yesterday was a weird day. I opened the paper to see a big picture of myself, spent most of the morning answering calls from journalists and by early evening I was talking about food with Chris Evans on Radio 2 (we were meant to be talking about art but I think he was put off when I started describing one of my works live on air).

Last Thursday was even weirder. I'd been out partying the night before, celebrating the end of my course at the Royal Academy of Arts, when the phone rang at about 10am. I stumbled across some of my friends who were sleeping in the lounge and answered it: it was a friend from the colleges, saying that someone from Charles Saatchi's gallery wanted to speak to me, and to stay by the phone in case he called.

It's difficult to say exactly what goes through your mind when you get a call like that. You can't really process it (the hangover probably didn't help). To be honest I didn't really know what to do, so I went into the lounge, had a few coffees and waited. And waited.

Eventually a very nice lady from the gallery rang and said that Saatchi liked my work a lot and wanted to buy the full set of images because it'd be a shame to split them up. The asking price for the complete edition was £4,500, but he offered £3,000. I accepted without really thinking about it and went down to the local cafe to celebrate with a big breakfast. Everyone, myself included, was sort of stunned.

I definitely wasn't going to barter with the guy; I wasn't going to argue. I hadn't been expecting to sell my work at all - it's quite challenging stuff, vaguely based on internet adverts and billboard advertising, but offering a kind of personal view of the world - so the whole experience was kind of amazing.

There's been a lot of mixed press about Saatchi, but from my position I don't really care about that. I'm just very pleased that he's taken an interest, and his buying habits aren't really a concern of mine. When I put my work up for sale everyone can buy it, and the graduation show this year is really strong. There's loads of great work there, and I'd really recommend seeing all of it.

Am I worried about the future? Not really. Whatever happens happens, and I'm going to take things at my own pace. Before all this I was thinking of taking a year off to get away from it all and teach English in China. I guess I might delay that a bit now.

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