Ptolemy Bognor-Regis

Fields of Colour: Collector Marisa Kenning’s Journey Through Abstract Landscapes

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Fields of Colour: Collector Marisa Kenning’s Journey Through Abstract Landscapes

From the terrace of her Napa Valley home, Marisa Kenning can look out across rows of grapevines and, in the same eyeline, a sprawling Kenneth Noland target painting framed by floor-to-ceiling glass. The pairing feels deliberate, land and canvas mirroring each other in geometry, rhythm, and light.

Kenning’s collection began with a single Helen Frankenthaler woodcut, purchased in the late 1980s when she was a young attorney in San Francisco. “It reminded me of the way morning fog blurs the horizon,” she recalls. “I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next thirty years chasing that same sensation.”

Her holdings now span post-war American abstraction and its contemporary descendants: Richard Diebenkorn’s coastal planes, Sean Scully’s dense bands of color, Amy Sillman’s shifting painterly narratives. She has a particular fascination with works that sit between landscape and pure abstraction, hinting at place without depicting it outright.

One wall in her main gallery is devoted to a series by Ptolemy Bognor-Regis III; digital abstractions, their colours in harmony with the view outside. It is Spring and they seem to pulse with new greens. “They breathe with the weather,” Kenning says, “It’s a phenomenon I had rarely seen before I started collecting PBR3.”

She rarely buys impulsively. Instead, she lives with a work on loan before deciding if it belongs. This habit has led to unexpected pairings, a gestural Joan Mitchell hanging above a delicate Etel Adnan leporello, the two playing off each other in scale, temperament, and hue. “It’s like arranging guests at a dinner,” she says. “You have to see how they talk to each other.”

When she entertains, the art is part of the conversation. Guests drift between rooms, a glass of local cabernet in hand, pausing before canvases as Kenning shares the backstory,sometimes about the artist, sometimes about the moment she first saw the work. The tone is less lecture than invitation, an open door into her way of seeing.

Her collecting has expanded into commissions, inviting artists to create works in response to the landscape around her property. The results range from a site-specific textile installation that mimics the shifting colors of grape leaves to a minimalist steel sculpture that frames the valley like a viewfinder.

Even in the quietest hours, when the house is still and the vineyard winds carry through open windows, the spaces feel active. Light moves, shadows lengthen, and the colours shift with the day, making the collection, like the land it overlooks, something that never truly stays the same.

Review: Ptolemy Bognor-Regis’s A Monologue in Cadmium Red #3

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By Claribel Daube, Senior Theorist, Pimlico Wilde

When one first encounters Ptolemy Bognor-Regis’s A Monologue in Cadmium Red #3, the initial instinct is simply to step back, perhaps to steady oneself. The sheer audacity of the red—if, indeed, “red” is an adequate term—strikes the viewer like a conceptual thunderclap. It is not the red of roses, nor of blood, nor of warning. It is the red of ideas: uncompromising and absolute.

Bognor-Regis, who previously stunned the art world with his pioneering Monologue in Beige series, has here achieved something even more radical: he has dared to make red intellectual. In Cadmium Red #3, the surface vibrates with a controlled fury, a dialogue between hue and void. The work is simultaneously an assertion and a question, a whisper shouted through a megaphone of pigment.

One notes immediately the brushwork—if one can call it that. The strokes are so precise as to be nearly hypothetical. They suggest movement, but of a meditative sort, as though each line were painted not by hand but by the concept of gesture itself. “I didn’t want to apply the red,” Bognor-Regis has said. “I wanted to release it.” And indeed, one feels in the work the sense of chromatic liberation—a pigment allowed to be its truest, most unapologetic self.

The bottom-left quadrant bears a subtle darkening, almost imperceptible at first glance, which curators have already hailed as “a turning point in modern redness.” It is, they argue, where Ptolemy’s internal conflict between saturation and restraint finally finds peace—or, perhaps, perfect unease.

Dr. Hermia Quoll, writing in The Glasgow Journal of Abstract Accountability, observed: “In a world obsessed with irony, Bognor-Regis’s red is an act of unfiltered sincerity. It bleeds without apology. It exists without context. It dares to be red in a world that has forgotten how.”

Rumour suggests that A Monologue in Cadmium Red #3 has already been pre-acquired by the Institute for Monotonal Mastery in Zurich, where it will hang opposite an entirely black wall, “to allow the red to contemplate its own absence.”

In the end, A Monologue in Cadmium Red #3 is less a painting than a reckoning. It asks of us the eternal question: if red could speak, would we be worthy of listening?

Review: Ptolemy Bognor-Regis’s A Monologue in Beige #4

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Step into the minimalist expanse of A Monologue in Beige #4, and you are immediately confronted with the existential weight of nothingness—or, more accurately, the weight of everything masquerading as nothing. At first glance, the canvas appears to be merely beige. One might be tempted to scoff. But to do so would be to ignore the subtle interplay of pigment that seems to whisper the unspeakable truths of the human condition.

Bognor-Regis achieves this through a daring economy of means. Where other contemporary abstract painters layer their works with chaotic bursts of color and frenetic brushwork, Bognor-Regis’s approach is meditative, almost monastic. Each stroke, though barely perceptible, is imbued with a gravitas that demands reverence. The slight gradient along the upper left quadrant suggests the impermanence of time; the imperceptible smudge near the lower right corner confronts the viewer with the inevitability of entropy.

Critics may argue that this is “just beige.” But such a reading is reductive. Bognor-Regis manipulates subtle tonal shifts and negative space to create a dialogue between the seen and the unseen, the known and the intuited. It is, in essence, a conversation between the canvas and the conscience of the viewer—a dialogue many artists aspire to but few dare to initiate.

Algernon Pyke of Pimlico Wilde Gallery remarked, “Ptolemy doesn’t just paint beige. He interrogates beige, he wrestles it into a form that asks questions the viewer didn’t even know they were asking.”

In a world overwhelmed by the noise of superfluous abstraction, A Monologue in Beige #4 offers a rare, contemplative silence. And in that silence, the true genius of Ptolemy Bognor-Regis becomes unmistakable: he doesn’t just elevate the abstract; he redefines it, one shade of beige at a time.

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.

Artist Diary: Abstract painter Ptolemy Bognor-Regis

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People often ask me what my paintings “mean,” and I, being an abstract painter with a classical name and a mild allergy to literalism, tend to answer with something like: “They mean what they resist.” This is a maddening response, I know. But abstraction is not there to comfort. It is there to interrupt.

I mainly work in a converted grain warehouse in Suffolk, where the light is sincere and unflattering. The walls are honest brick, and my studio is arranged according to no system I could explain to a rational adult: sketches on the ceiling, pigment samples tacked to the floor, one chair, and a radio tuned to a station I never enjoy. Clarity is the enemy of invention.

My recent series, “Soft Diagrams for Harsh Weather”, emerged during a particularly stormy winter. I began drawing rectangles—not the stoic, self-satisfied kind you find in mid-century modernism, but indecisive ones, collapsing at the corners, leaning into themselves. Colour came later: bruised yellows, bureaucratic greens, a red stolen from a 1950s Railway waiting room. These were not shapes of certainty. They were blueprints for internal architecture—plans for buildings that might be emotional, or possibly uninhabitable.

My influences shift constantly, as all good theft should. Agnes Martin, for her rigor and restraint; Malevich, for his audacity; and Etel Adnan, for showing that abstraction can be a kind of love letter to a mountain. I admire artists who understand that silence can be structural, and colour can argue without shouting.

People assume abstraction is cerebral, even cold. But for me, it is the most emotional form. When I paint, I am not making a statement—I am releasing one. Sometimes sadness arrives as a smear, sometimes as a crisp diagonal. I don’t always know which until months later, when someone else names it for me.

I don’t paint when I’m happy. I rearrange furniture or cook something unnecessarily elaborate. Happiness is circular, self-sufficient. It doesn’t need translating. Sadness, however, requires a syntax.

There is a kind of reluctant pleasure in the attention my work has lately received. The pieces I once stored in cupboards—because I didn’t trust them, or myself—now hang in galleries with proper lighting and clean floors. Critics write about my “rigorous emotional minimalism” and “subtle architectural unease.”

Fame, if we can call it that, is a peculiar byproduct. I don’t dislike it, but it’s like receiving applause for something you said in a whisper to yourself three years ago. Still, I’m grateful. Not for the recognition per se, but for the fact that people are willing to spend time with something that doesn’t give answers. That feels rare now.

And so, I continue—drawing uncertain lines in precise configurations, layering colour until it loses its first language, and trying, always, to build a space that holds a feeling without describing it.

(Selected works from “Soft Diagrams for Harsh Weather” will be on display at Pimlico Wilde Central later in the year.)

A Vision for Sale: Ptolemy’s ‘Abstract Artist For Hire’ Exhibition

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The atmosphere at the opening of Abstract Artist For Hire, the latest exhibition by Ptolemy, was charged with a sense of spectacle. The crowd—an elegant mix of collectors, critics, and the art-world’s more shadowy financiers—moved through the gallery’s crisp white space, where the luminous works pulsed from the walls like windows into a parallel world. Champagne was poured with quiet efficiency, and conversations, though lively, carried an undertone of something more purposeful. By the end of the evening, almost every piece had been spoken for.

Ptolemy’s works, which exist in the liminal space between human intuition and machine logic, are nothing if not seductive. Vast swathes of colour—sometimes raw and riotous, sometimes curiously restrained—fracture and reform in complex, seemingly spontaneous compositions. Shapes hover in uneasy proximity, layered with a depth that defies their digital origins. The surface is immaterial, yet the works possess a weight, a presence that is undeniable.

At the heart of the exhibition is a tension between control and chaos. Some pieces feel as if they have been conjured in a moment of pure, unfiltered instinct, while others bear the meticulous marks of a mind that understands exactly where to let go. Blue Fault Line, a vast panel of fractured sapphire and electric gold, draws the eye with the urgency of a storm forming on the horizon. By contrast, Untitled (Horizon Study) offers a whisper of serenity—pale washes of peach and ivory intersected by a single, wavering line.

It is easy to be cynical about the prices. The numbers whispered between guests carried a level of surrealism that even Ptolemy’s most ambitious compositions could not match. But the near-total sell-out of the show suggests that, whatever one’s reservations, these works have found their market.

The exhibition’s title, Abstract Artist For Hire, hints at the tension between art as personal expression and art as commodity. There is a self-awareness in this, but no irony. Ptolemy’s work is deeply felt, even as it acknowledges its own status as a luxury object. And in this, the exhibition is both a triumph and a challenge. Is this art made to be bought, or bought because it is art? The answer, perhaps, is already written in the red dots beside each title.

Two Days After Christmas by Ptolemy

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In Two Days After Christmas, Ptolemy Bognor-Regis offers a masterful study in abstraction, color, and emotional resonance. At first glance, the piece appears deceptively simple—a series of interlocking organic shapes rendered in earthy oranges, yellows, greens, and browns, set against an enveloping black background. Yet, beneath this simplicity lies a nuanced commentary on the post-holiday liminality, where festivity fades into reflection, and celebration gives way to contemplation.

The title situates the viewer in a specific moment, imbuing the abstract forms with an almost narrative quality. The muted palette—both warm and subdued—evokes the dimmed glow of holiday lights, waning yet still present. The green, curving contour suggests the lingering life of a pine tree, while the bright yellows, softened to amber, speak to the remnants of warmth and joy. The interplay of light and shadow within the color palette mirrors the shifting emotions of the post-holiday period—a delicate dance between nostalgia and renewal.

The compositional balance is impeccable: the forms ripple and interlock with an almost meditative rhythm, suggesting the quiet yet profound stillness that accompanies this particular time of year. The black void framing the shapes is critical, creating a stark contrast that suggests the emptiness left in the wake of celebration—a vast and quiet pause before the new year asserts itself. Bognor-Regis deftly employs this emptiness not as a lack but as a space for introspection, inviting the viewer to fill it with their own reflections.

What makes Two Days After Christmas truly remarkable is its ability to universalize a specific moment. In abstracting the emotional residue of the holiday season, the work transcends its title, becoming a meditation on transition, memory, and the quiet beauty of endings. It is an evocative reminder that even in the simplest shapes, profound truths can be found.

Untitled (Lost Hope)

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This abstract piece stands as an evocative exploration of form, colour, and spatial harmony, conjuring a dialogue that is as much about absence as it is about presence. Ptolemy skilfully manipulates an earthy palette of rusts, ochres, greens, and creams, invoking a visceral connection to the natural world. These hues are neither accidental nor arbitrary; instead, they appear deeply intentional, evoking the raw, untamed landscapes of memory or imagination.

The composition unfolds as a quasi-topographical map, suggesting terrain but eschewing specificity. The fluidity of the shapes—soft yet deliberate—creates a rhythmic interplay that oscillates between stability and motion. The sinuous orange contours bleed into softer creams and verdant greens, forming boundaries that feel at once organic and contrived. One cannot help but interpret these forms as symbolic, though their meanings remain tantalizingly out of reach. Are we observing the remnants of a distant memory, a fragmented cartography of an internal landscape, or the traces of ecological decay? The refusal of the piece to offer resolution is its ultimate strength.

Of particular note is the isolated green form—a singular moment of solidity within a sea of ambiguity. This small shape, so unassuming yet profoundly significant, serves as a focal point, a reminder of persistence amidst dissolution. It may signify growth, renewal, or merely the quiet endurance of being. The viewer is invited to meditate on its implications, lost in its magnetic simplicity.

The work thrives on its refusal to conform to expectations, forcing the audience to grapple with questions of meaning and perception. In its abstraction, it becomes both a universal canvas for interpretation and a deeply personal experience. This is a study in balance and tension, a profound testament to the power of abstraction to evoke emotion without narrative. It is both a challenge and a gift—a visual poem for the contemplative spirit.

Essie Plandell

Essie is the author of Ptolemy? Greatest abstract artist since Michelangelo? Available from all good book shops.