By Andrew Paul

Why did you decide to name your gallery Common Sense?

For a bunch of reasons. Common Sense refers to the esthetic sense, which is a common sense — something people share. You don’t need to be a genius to understand that art is for looking at; what you like is what you like. Anybody can understand art as well as a so-called “expert,” because everybody is an expert on their own experience.

The sign on the front door says that your hours of operation are “by chance or appointment only.” Why is that?
We don’t have set hours, because we don’t have any employees. We don’t have a gallery attendant so there are just us artist here. Basically a lot of galleries have gallery attendants who are getting paid, but they’re just sitting on their hands — why bother?

Who owns the studio?
I own the space. We used to be in a rental situation at a very poor space with always increasing rent. So when the opportunity came to buy a space in this neighbourhood, I jumped on it.

How many artists share Common Sense?
There are three sculptors here: myself, Andy French and Rob Willms. And my wife Nola Cassady is a painter, and she’s working upstairs. We’re not a large organization. We’re not a quote-unquote “artist run,” a.k.a., run by a board of people who actually aren’t artists.

Do you have plans to register as an official organization?
No plans, really. The idea is always sort of there on the back burner, because registering for an organizational status opens up bigger funding channels for you, but it also becomes less flexible. I want to be an artist, not an arts administrator, so running it this way works for the people involved, so as long as it keeps doing that there won’t be any changes.

It sounds like you’ve found your dream setup here.
That’s the Common Sense, right? What do you want to do? Do you want to give a gallerist 50 per cent [of your profits]? Forget it. Let us artists work together. Here’s a space that we’re going to use to put our work in. What a great idea. We don’t take any money for the commission, 100 per cent of the money goes to the artist. They’re the one doing the work so they should be taking the money — it’s common sense.