NEON194 PICCADILLY — ELLIOT WINSPEAR

NEON194

PICCADILLY

I met Cymon Eckel the owner of Neon194 Piccadilly back in 2022. The planned meeting unfortunately fell two days after I was broken the bad news by my then girlfriend. At the time, me and my ex girlfriend were about three months into renting a two bedroom flat in Soho. A stroke of luck, we acquired the home on an affordable council flat rate through an opportunity that came about via my ex girlfriend’s job. As a result, when we broke up I was the one tasked with moving out (rightly so). After one last important meeting in the spare bedroom/home studio.

Well I say important. I was maybe a little lackadaisical in my approach to the encounter. In my defence, I had a lot on my mind. Cymon at the time was proposing to purchase artwork for his new event space that was opening later in the year. To give you the general gist of how it went, I was asked at one point what my pricing was for my art and I responded with something along the lines of ‘I’m not sure what do you think’. I might have already dropped the ball when I started talking about my ex but that line was the definitive nail in the coffin.

I was committed wholeheartedly in both my personal and professional life, yet it became clear that I needed to find another gear to keep up with the life I’d rather fortuitously found myself in. From as early as primary school I have been labelled as a ‘cruiser’ and in a not so self fulfilling prophecy I had been living up to that title ever since.

At the time of writing, most of what you see on my website has been done within the year prior to the situation described. Within a month of my breakup I acquired a studio space and I haven’t looked back since. Okay fine that’s not true I look back a lot but Rather ambitiously, ‘get art in central London’ was on mind (mainly out of FOMO) and around six months into my time in the studio I achieved that goal. Neon194 Piccadilly is the first space to feature my art and its an absolute pleasure to be featuring my work in such a bright and inclusive space in the heart of London.