The Pages After the Paintings: Notes from Colchester’s Gallery Desks
Photo: Brethren's General Missionary and Tract Committee, No restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons
On a grey November afternoon in 2026, I stood at a gallery desk in Colchester and watched a woman spend four minutes reading the comment book before she looked at a single painting. She laughed once, nodded twice, and then went in. That, I think, is the quiet power of the humble guest book. It is not the main event. It is not even the warm-up act. But it might be the most honest bit of the whole visit.
The book nobody plans to read
Gallery labels are polished. They are written by people who know things, checked by people who know more things, and printed in a font that suggests calm authority. Comment books are the opposite. They are biro, wonky spelling, a drawing of a cat in the margin and a complaint about the car park. And yet, across Colchester’s smaller art spaces — the studios, the pop-ups, the volunteer-run rooms off the beaten track — these messy pages often capture the town’s relationship with art better than anything on the wall.
A wall label tells you what the curator knows. A comment book tells you what the town noticed.
The thank-you economy
If you spend a wet Saturday flicking through the comment books of Colchester’s galleries — and I have — patterns emerge quickly. The first is gratitude. Not grand, gushing gratitude, but the small, specific kind that sounds like someone genuinely surprised to have enjoyed themselves. ‘Came in to get out of the rain. Left feeling oddly hopeful.’ ‘Lovely morning. Came for the shop, stayed for the art.’ ‘First time in here. I thought galleries were not for me. I was wrong. Thank you.’
There is something very Colchester about that last one. We are a town that likes to be pleasantly surprised by itself. We are also a town that will thank a volunteer for opening a door, then apologise for bothering them. The comment books are full of that instinct. ‘Thanks for the free biscuits.’ ‘Thanks for not making me feel thick.’ ‘Thanks for the chair in the corner. I needed it.’
Complaints, but make them local
Of course, not every entry is a bouquet. The second genre is complaint, and it is rarely about the art. It is about the practicalities of being a body in a building. ‘Please label the stairs. My knees are not abstract.’ ‘More benches, fewer plinths.’ ‘Too much reading.’ ‘Not enough reading.’ ‘Why is the café shut on Mondays?’ One memorable card, spotted in a studio somewhere near the Dutch Quarter, simply said: ‘Parking. Still. A nightmare.’
There are also the art complaints, which are more interesting. ‘I don’t understand it but I liked standing near it.’ ‘The big blue thing made me feel seasick. In a good way?’ ‘I think the video was too long. I think I watched it twice.’ And then the gloriously blunt: ‘Not for me. But glad it exists.’
That last one should be printed on a tea towel and sold in every gallery shop in Britain. It is the most Colchester sentence I have ever read.
Children are the toughest critics
If you want to know what a exhibition is really doing, skip the adults and go straight to the pages where children have been let loose with a pencil. Children do not do polite. They do not worry about being seen to understand contemporary art. They write: ‘I liked the big blue thing. It looked like my nan’s bath.’ ‘This is boring. I liked the stairs.’ ‘My brother says the painting is a bit rude. I agree.’
One comment book in a pop-up near Castle Park had a full-page drawing of a dinosaur wearing a hat, with the caption: ‘This is the artist. He is nice.’ I have no idea which exhibition that referred to, but I would like to visit it.
What the books actually do
Here is the thing: these books are not just a bit of fun. In small arts spaces, where there is no budget for audience research and no marketing team to run a focus group, the comment book is the feedback loop. Volunteers read them. Curators flick through them. Programmers take note when the same complaint appears three times in a fortnight. A note saying ‘please do more evening openings’ might actually lead to a late Thursday. A note saying ‘the lighting made my eyes hurt’ might lead to a different bulb.
And on a human level, they do something else. They make a visit feel like a conversation rather than a lecture. You are not just receiving the art. You are answering back. In a town like Colchester, where so much of the cultural scene runs on goodwill, volunteer hours and the stubborn belief that art belongs to everyone, that matters.
How to leave a note worth reading
The next time you visit a gallery in Colchester and see a comment book, do not walk past it. You do not have to write a review. You do not have to be clever. You can write ‘the tea was nice’ or ‘I liked the quiet’ or ‘I came in with a headache and left with less of one’. You can draw a bad cat. You can complain about the parking. You can admit you cried at the video and then apologise for it, because you are British.
Just write something. The pages after the paintings are waiting.
And if you are the person who wrote ‘I don’t understand it but I liked standing near it’ in a Colchester gallery this autumn: thank you. You understood it better than you think.
