Frieze week always pulls everything into the centre for a few days. I usually skip the main tents and walk the smaller galleries instead, mostly in the east but a couple further out. Its easier to actually look at the work when there isn’t a queue and someone trying to hand you a booklet every ten steps.

This year a lot of the painting felt very finished. Clean edges, careful surfaces, the kind of thing that photographs well and sits neatly in a booth. Nothing wrong with that. A few of the newer spaces had work that still showed the making more clearly — things built from packaging or offcuts, or drawings that looked like they had been left alone rather than resolved. One place had a row of small assemblages using found plastic. You could see the glue lines. People stopped longer there than in front of the smoother paintings.

I kept thinking about my own boards while I was walking. The ones in the studio in West London are just full decks, shuffled and then fixed card by card on the A1 board. No rearranging after the fact. When a run of the same suit lands together it stays. Standing in those smaller rooms made the difference sharper. Most of the work I saw had been composed. Mine starts with the shuffle and then I only assemble what already happened. The cards remain cards. You can still read them if you get close.

A couple of the gallerists I spoke to were looking for emerging London artists whose work didn’t need much explaining on the wall. They had already seen plenty of painting. One of them asked what the boards actually were once I mentioned them. I said real cards, one order, no prints. That was enough for the conversation to continue. We didn’t talk long. Fair week is like that.

I got back to the studio the next day and shuffled another deck. Same process as always. The result didn’t look like anything I had just seen in the galleries, which felt right. London has a lot of strong emerging artists right now. Most of them are doing something more resolved than what I do. I just keep fixing the order that comes out of the shuffle and leaving the small accidents in place. Thats the part that still interests me when I walk around during the week and then come home.