By Harrie Dearing. First published on harriedearingart.com.
There’s a particular kind of relief that comes when someone says yes to you not because they have to, but because they genuinely believe in what you’re building. That’s exactly what happened when I reached out to Cass Art to ask if they’d support Studio Brut, the new outsider artist studio I’m co-founding with SLART here in Swindon.
They said yes. And not just a polite, token yes, Cass Art has come on board as an in-kind sponsor, donating art supplies to help us kit out the studio from the ground up. For two outsider artists who’ve spent years knocking on doors that mostly stayed shut because of funding, this matters more than I can easily put into words.
So this post is simple, really. It’s a thank you. But it’s also an introduction, because I want the people who read this blog and follow Studio Brut to understand exactly who Cass Art are, where they came from, and why their support means something far beyond their donation.
Why I Asked Cass Art, Specifically
When you’re building a studio for outsider artists, people who, like me, often come to art without formal training, without the gallery connections, without the access that the traditional art world quietly assumes everyone has, you start paying close attention to who actually walks the talk on inclusion versus who just says the right words.
Cass Art’s mission is “Let’s fill this town with artists.” It’s plastered above their shop fronts, and it’s not just a marketing line. The more you read about them, the more it felt like a mirror of exactly what Studio Brut is trying to do in Swindon: break down the barriers that stop people from realising they’re allowed to make art at all, regardless of training, age, or background.
There was also a quieter reason. Cass Art has built meaningful environmental practice into how they operate, something that matters to me as an artist and matters to Studio Brut as we think about how we run our space long-term. Supporting suppliers who take sustainability seriously isn’t a side issue for us; it’s part of the same ethos as making art accessible. You can’t claim to care about the future of creativity while ignoring the future of the planet that creativity happens on.
A Shop Next to the National Gallery: Where It All Began
Cass Art’s story starts in 1984, when founder Mark Cass took over the lease of 13 Charing Cross Road in London, a building sitting right next door to the National Gallery, which had already been serving artists for the best part of a century by that point, having first opened its doors as an art shop in 1898. It’s a site with serious history; over the decades, visitors to that stretch of Charing Cross Road are said to have included Lawrence of Arabia, Winston Churchill, and Claude Monet.
Cass’s connection to art materials actually goes back further than 1984, though. He was introduced to the world of art supplies at just twelve years old, after visiting the Reeves paint factory in Enfield, an experience he’s described as ‘ the moment pigment got into his blood’ I ADORE THIS PHRASE, lets just say it again for the sake of poetry,‘ the moment pigment got into his blood’. Before launching his own venture, he spent the early 1980s as Managing Director of Craftsmith, then the largest graphics and craft retailer in the UK, so by the time he opened that first shop, he knew the trade inside out.
What’s struck me most, reading into the company’s background, is that the commitment to art isn’t a recent branding decision dreamed up by a marketing team, it runs in the family. Mark Cass’s great-uncle was Paul Cassirer, a significant art dealer in the 1920s who championed the Impressionist movement across Europe, and Cass was a trustee of the Cass Sculpture Foundation, a British charity that promoted twenty-first century British sculpture through public commissions and exhibitions. The family’s involvement with supporting artists is often described as stretching back over a century, which means Cass Art’s current sponsorship of small studios like ours isn’t an anomaly. It’s the latest chapter in something that’s been going on for generations.
More Than a Shop: The Manifesto Behind the Brand
What turned Cass Art from “a good art shop” into a genuine cultural force in the UK art world was the decision, fairly early on, to build the whole business around a manifesto rather than just a product range.
Working with the renowned brand design studio Pentagram, Cass reimagined what an art materials store could even feel like, transforming the shops into light, airy spaces designed to make browsing relaxed and comfortable, with parts of the store specifically given over to supporting artists within the local community. That detail matters to me. It’s the difference between a shop that sells you paint and a shop that sees itself as part of the creative ecosystem of the town it’s in.
The company describes its mission plainly: to encourage everyone to realise their creative talents by providing the world’s top quality materials at the guaranteed best prices. And crucially, that “everyone” is meant literally. Mark Cass has pointed to Picasso’s famous line ‘ every child is an artist, and the problem is how to remain one once we grow up ‘ as a guiding philosophy for the brand, with the company’s job being to act as a reminder that the creative potential never actually disappears, whether someone is three years old or a hundred and three, professional or total beginner.
That’s the exact thinking that underpins Studio Brut. Outsider artists are routinely told, in a hundred small ways, that they’ve left it too late, that they didn’t train properly, that they don’t belong in “real” galleries or “real” supply shops. A company built on the idea that creative potential never actually leaves you is a company that, on a fundamental level, gets it.
A Genuinely Independent Business, Still Growing
Cass Art has remained independently owned since that first shop opened in 1984, and the company marks 2024 as the fortieth year of its mission to fill the country, its cities, towns, and village, with artists. In an industry where small specialist retailers regularly get swallowed up by larger conglomerates, that independence is worth noting. It means decisions about who to support and what to prioritise aren’t being made by a faraway board with no connection to artists on the ground.
The growth has been steady rather than explosive. From that single Charing Cross Road shop, the company expanded gradually, opening in Liverpool in 2015, for example, with the “Let’s fill this town with artists” branding going up as it always does whenever Cass Art moves into a new city. Today, stores can be found across the UK in cities including Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, and Brighton, alongside the original London locations and even a campus store at Winchester School of Art.
Every Cass Art store is staffed by people who are artists themselves, which is a small detail that says a lot. Walk into one of their shops and the person behind the till isn’t reciting a script; they’re someone who has stood in front of a blank canvas and understood the particular kind of fear and excitement that comes with it.
Putting Their Money Where Their Mission Is
Cass Art, partners with major institutions and organisations across UK culture, including Sky Arts, the National Portrait Gallery, the Mayor of London’s Fourth Plinth Schools Awards, University of the Arts London, the National Saturday Club, and The Other Art Fair, on top of countless local galleries and community art projects. Cass Art has been a partner of both Portrait Artist of the Year and Landscape Artist of the Year on Sky Arts since those shows began in 2013 and 2015 respectively.
Then there’s the Cass Art Prize, launched more recently as a direct extension of the family’s long history of supporting artists. Founder Mark Cass has described the prize as “the continuation of this legacy,” furthering the mission to fill every town with artists “from professionals to beginners, no matter what age.” In its 2025 edition, the main prize was £10,000 plus a free stand at The Other Art Fair, with additional categories including an Over 65 Award personally supported by Mark Cass, celebrating art made by people later in life, and a Judge’s New Talent Award offering a solo show at Soho Revue.
Reading through that list, what stands out is the scope. This isn’t a company that only backs the polished, professional end of the art world. There’s real attention paid to beginners, to older artists, to students, and to people working completely outside conventional career paths, which is, not coincidentally, exactly the population Studio Brut exists to serve. Artists working as outsiders.
There’s also a particular focus on supporting students and early-career artists as they leave education. Cass Art has spoken about wanting to help students experiment and find the kind of artist they want to become while they’re studying, and then continuing to support them once they graduate, when it can become much harder to keep a practice going without institutional backing. That’s almost a word-for-word description of the gap Studio Brut is trying to fill for outsider artists in Swindon, just from a different angle, we’re connecting & supporting people who never had the institution in the first place.
The Cass Art Collection: Quality Without the Price Tag
One more piece of the puzzle worth mentioning is the Cass Art Collection, their own-brand range. Launched in 2013 in collaboration with the award-winning designer Angus Hyland, a partner at Pentagram, the Collection has since been expanded to include professional-grade Artists’ Oil Colour, Artists’ Watercolour, Exhibition Grade canvas, and Cass Art Acrylic. Every material in the range has reportedly been tested in real studios by working artists before it reaches the shelves.
The point of the Collection, as Cass Art describes it, is to put genuinely high-quality materials into the hands of people who might otherwise be priced out of working with proper, archival-grade paint and paper. For outsider artists in particular, many of whom are working without grant funding, without gallery backing, and often while juggling other jobs or circumstances, that combination of quality and affordability isn’t a nice extra. It’s the difference between being able to develop a serious practice and not.
What This Partnership Means for Studio Brut
Studio Brut started, in plain terms, out of relentless passion and frustration with the system. I’ve spent years trying to find a proper studio space, hearing the same answer over and over: there isn’t the funding for artists like us. When Swindon Culture Collective offered SLART and me the chance to build something, we jumped to make this bigger than just a personal studio, a real space, with a residency programme, exhibition opportunities, and skill-share sessions for outsider artists across the town, we weren’t going to let that chance slip by.
But right now, the studio is an empty room without materials in it. Paint, brushes, paper, canvas, the actual stuff that turns a space into somewhere art gets made, costs money that a brand-new studio simply doesn’t have lying around in year one.
That’s where Cass Art’s in-kind donation changes things for us. Their support means Studio Brut can open its doors with proper, high quality materials from day one, ready for the resident artists, the micro-residency programme, and the skill-share laboratories we’re building for Swindon’s outsider art community. It means the artists who come through our doors won’t be working with substandard supplies just because the studio. It means a national, family-run business with a hundred years of history backing artists has looked at a small new studio in Swindon and decided it was worth standing behind.
That’s not nothing. For outsider artists especially, that kind of validation, that someone with real standing in the art world sees what you’re doing and wants to be part of it, can be just as, or more so valuable as the materials themselves.
I will be following up with another blog post soon about the specific items donated by Cass Art, and the part they play in Studio Brut.
Thank You, Cass Art
So, to Mark Cass and everyone at Cass Art: thank you. Thank you for building a company around the belief that creative potential doesn’t have an expiry date or a minimum qualification. Thank you for backing students, beginners, older artists, and outsiders, not just the polished professional end of the industry. And thank you, specifically, for looking at Studio Brut, a brand-new studio in Swindon, founded by two outsider artists with more determination than funding, and deciding we were worth supporting.
“Let’s fill this town with artists” is Cass Art’s line, but right now, in Swindon, it’s becoming ours too. With your help, Studio Brut is going to make that mission real for the outsider artists in this town who’ve been waiting for someone to say yes.
Want to dive deeper into Cass Art and their story?
Watch this space, and follow Studio BRUT on Instagram for updates as we get the studio ready to open this summer.