Table One

For two years, Arteway has been built almost entirely through screens. Artists met over Google Meet. Courses were filmed in studios across Australia, the UK, the United States. Feedback arrived as comments, emails, messages. The community was real, but the distances between its people were too.

Last Saturday, for one evening in London, that changed.

Table One was Arteway’s first in-person gathering — eight artists around a single table, four from the Arteway roster and four whose work we have long admired. The occasion was simple: good food, good wine, and time to talk properly. No agenda. No programme. Just a room full of people who care about painting.

The timing felt right. London’s art fair season had brought a particular energy to the city — galleries full, openings running late, the streets carrying that specific buzz that arrives when a lot of art is in one place at once. We spent part of the day at The Other Art Fair, presented by Saatchi Art, before the evening began.

But the dinner was the thing. After years of coordinating across time zones, of meeting artists in the weeks before a film crew arrived and saying goodbye shortly after, sitting together without an agenda felt like a different kind of conversation entirely.

“A room full of artists we really admire. The evening was exactly what we hoped it would be.”

To the Arteway artists who made the journey from around the UK — who have trusted us with their practice, opened their studios to our cameras, and shared their process with thousands of students — the evening was a small way of saying thank you in person. Those words mean something different face to face.

And to the new faces at the table: it was a genuine pleasure. The conversations that began that night are ones we expect to continue.

Table One is the first of what we intend to be many. As the Arteway roster grows, so does the community around it — artists, gallerists, curators, and the people who simply love making. We want to find more ways to bring that community together in rooms like this one.

The next one is already being planned.