Slow Style Home: Decorating Personal, Meaningful Interiors

What Makes a Painting “Good”? With Julia Collins

Zandra Zuraw Season 43

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 12:54

Text me your thoughts or questions on this episode!

To hear the full episode and see the video, subscribe here.

In this guest episode, I sit down with Julia Collins, a London-based art advisor and dealer behind Collins & Green, to talk about how to actually look at a painting — no art history degree required.

Julia has a real academic art background, and by her own admission, it's “in many ways irrelevant” to how she looks at a painting. The pieces she loves best aren't always the most technically accomplished — they're the ones that catch her somewhere specific: a color balance, a blank face, a detail she can't quite explain. That's the whole method, and it's one anyone can use.

Subscribe to hear us walk through 10 paintings as Julia dissects each one. 


Subscribe to the show to access future episodes! Going forward, we'll continue to publish 1 free episode per month.  If you'd like to have access to the other 3-4 episodes each month, please click on the subscription link, above. 

Take the quiz: What's Your Style DNA?