Ptolemy For Sale

Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III: Five Places I’d Like to See My Work

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Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III: Five Places I’d Like to See My Work

As an artist, I’m constantly thinking about where my work lives after it leaves my studio. Sometimes I imagine the walls of great galleries and museums; other times, I see my pieces out in the wild, interacting with the elements or drifting somewhere between worlds. Art, for me, is less about possession and more about presence,how it shifts when it’s placed somewhere unexpected. Here are five places I’d love to see my work one day.

1. The Tate Modern, London

Every artist wants to be seen here! There’s something powerful about the Tate’s vast Turbine Hall,its ability to make any artwork feel both monumental and intimate. To have a piece installed there would be a dream: my work held within a space that has introduced the world to so many boundary-pushing artists.

2. The Top of a Mountain

I often imagine one of my works at the summit of a peak, where the air is thin and the view endless. The piece wouldn’t just be an object but a companion to hikers who find it, a quiet marker of effort, altitude, and perspective.

3. The International Space Station (or Beyond)

The idea of my work floating in zero gravity excites me,the absence of weight, the freedom from walls or plinths. To see it drift against the backdrop of Earth, or even on the surface of another planet, would be to stretch the meaning of “placement” entirely.

4. A Public Square in My Hometown of Winchester

Grand aspirations are thrilling, but there’s something deeply grounding about placing art in the community that raised you. To see my work woven into the daily lives of people I grew up with,schoolchildren, neighbours, shopkeepers,would be a gift of returning.

5. At the Bottom of the Ocean

This one might never happen, but I love the idea of a piece submerged, slowly becoming part of an underwater landscape. Fish weaving through it, coral attaching, currents shaping its edges. It would no longer be mine,it would belong to the sea.

Art travels further than we ever do. Sometimes it hangs in a white cube, sometimes it weathers storms, and sometimes it exists only in our imaginations. These five places remind me why I keep creating: to let my work live many lives, even beyond my own.

Interview with Ptolemy Bognor-Regis: Chasing the Ultimate Painting

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In the shadow of great fortune and brighter genius, Ptolemy Bognor-Regis has emerged as one of the most talked-about figures in contemporary abstract art. The son of a shipping magnate turned media tycoon, Regis might have been content with a life of patronage or leisure,but instead, he’s hurled himself into the centre of artistic inquiry with a singular ambition: to create the last painting. The final word. The full stop of the visual age. We sat down with him to discuss his mission, his methods, and the piece he calls “A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth.”

Interviewer: Ptolemy, first of all, thank you for making time for this interview. Your latest work is causing a stir,critics have called you “the Rothko of Wales” and it “an act of chromatic violence.” What do you see when you look at A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth?

Ptolemy Bognor-Regis:

Thank you. What I see is the inside of a scream,a narrative collapsed into geometry. It’s not a painting of a bank robbery, obviously. It’s a record of the tension before and after such an event. The colour fields are characters. The orange is the alarm. The purple, a kind of communal numbness. The black shapes? They’re decisions, heavy with consequence.

Interviewer: There’s a boldness to your use of negative space. In this piece, the forms press against each other but never quite resolve. Is that intentional?

Regis:

Absolutely. Resolution is the enemy of truth. I’m not here to make peace on canvas,I’m here to expose the war beneath it. The non-resolution is the story. Harmony would be a betrayal of what I’m trying to capture.

Interviewer: You’ve described your artistic goal as “striving after the ultimate painting, after which nothing more can be said.” That’s a monumental ambition. Where does that come from?

Regis:

It comes from impatience, honestly. Impatience with repetition, with the saturation of half-statements in art. I grew up surrounded by enormous wealth, which gave me access,but also a kind of nausea. When everything is possible, meaning becomes slippery. I paint to locate meaning again. To pin it down once and for all, and then be done with it. After the final painting, there should be silence. A holy hush.

Interviewer: That sounds spiritual.

Regis:

It is. But not religious. I think of painting like monastic labor. Endless refinement, shaving away noise, until you hit the essential chord. One brushstroke away from revelation, always.

Interviewer: You’ve said you don’t use assistants, despite having the resources. Why?

Regis:

Because the images record my hesitation, doubt, and triumph. No assistant can fake that. I don’t want a painting that looks clean,I want one that’s wounded. That’s something you have to do yourself. Otherwise it’s merely decoration.

Interviewer: There’s a lot of speculation about your process. Some say you work in total darkness and then assess the result later. Is that true?

Regis (laughs):

Yes. And no. I do draw blind sometimes, but not always in darkness. It’s about trust,trust in the materials, trust in the moment. It’s like holding your breath underwater and waiting for the exact second the body tells you: Now. Draw that.

Interviewer: Looking ahead, do you believe the “final painting” is near?

Regis:

Some days I think I’ve already made it and just haven’t realized. Other days, I think I’m still a thousand lifetimes away. But I’ll keep trying. That’s all I can do.

Interviewer: What’s next for you?

Regis:

Silence. Reading. And perhaps that mythical final work.

A Bank Robbery in the Environs of Machynlleth is currently on view at Pimlico Wilde, London.

New work from Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III

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Untitled (Two hours stuck on a plane at Gatwick with no air-conditioning)

A good example of the well-known dictum suffering makes great art. Poor Ptolemy created this work as he sat, roasting, in a plane that had a problem with its engine. The mental anguish of flying in a machine that you have been told doesn’t work properly – how well he has captured that emotion in this piece. The colors zing and zang off each other, the central orange bespeaking the overwhelming question, viz, should I stand up and insist to be allowed off this plane. Mirrored by the lightest of greens, the universal symbol for Yes.

Brave Ptolemy stayed on the plane. The good news is they made it unscathed to Paris. That’s not as good as it sounds as they were supposed to be going to Casablanca, but out of the turmoil we have gained a modern masterpiece. Ptolemy we salute you, and – though you have sworn never to travel by plane again – we hope you make it back from Paris soon.

Untitled (Wimbledon Common from above) – New abstract work from Ptolemy

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What a fire cracker of a work! Ptolemy hits it out of the All-England Club once again with his meditation on existence and grass. “July is when I watch more tennis than any other time of the year. Of course I am primed to make art about the daily assault of grass on my eyes. The way it dies over the length of the tournament, it is heart-breaking, yet we must struggle on. In my work the grass never dies, it fights on, showing us the path and leading the way. Onward!”

Ptolemy is the only abstract artist I ever look at. Any other abstract artist is just a waste of eyeball energy.

Coca Nyula, art critic, dress designer and part-time magician

Ptolemy new canvas – An accident at Berkeley Square

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A canvas by Ptolemy created after he witnessed an accident in Berkeley Square between a taxi and a young woman. Luckily she walked away, the contents of her handbag strewn across the road. Ptolemy represents the fear, the surprise, the empathy in the searing lines of colour that cross the canvas.

An art critic writes…

Simply stunning. Unlike Gareth Southgate, with Accident in Berkeley Square Ptolemy has produced a winner. Personally this work speaks to me more than the Mona Lisa or any of those other renaissance works. Ptolemy is a modern day Michelangelo, anyone who disagrees needs to see a doctor for the head.

Ptolemy – The sadness of Abstract Art

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Yellow, the universal colour of melancholy since Goethe and Zola, imbues this canvas with a sense of deep alarm and overwrought anxiety. How does Ptolemy keep producing such winsome works? The blotches of greyed-green add an almost regal quality to the ensemble, reminiscent of works by such luminaries as Stubbs, Wilkins-Butt and R.E. Walton.
“In this work I tried to show the loneliness inherent in the abstract milieu. I hope it comes over in the image just how much abstract artists fight daily to bring their masterpieces to the public.”

With sublime shapes like lakes in a desert and excitement exuberating from the artwork’s every pore, it surely won’t be long until thousands of children are christened Ptolemy in his honour.

“Feeling like a Marinara pizza, but they don’t sell it” – new abstract art

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What a work! Ptolemy hits it out of the park again, with Feeling like a Marinara pizza, but they don’t sell it. What colors! What size! What a message of peace and love – for the pizza talk is obviously a distraction from his real meaning. Surely what is before us is actually a proto-flag? More than that, a British ensign or an American Stars and Stripes without stripes. Or stars. More than that, the purple of power infuses the rising sense of dread…that off-black line, I can’t look at it without feeling that Ptolemy is ahead of realpolitik, of even politic – he provides us with answers to questions the world is asking with bombs and bullets. I cry out to world leaders, listen to Ptolemy!

Wendell Conference-Jack, art critic and CEO of SpediaXY, the only company trying to put fine art on the moon.