Cato Ink
Gallery / 4 images
This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.
Many of the people in Cato Ink’s paintings have what the artist describes as an “uncle quality”. “I grew up listening to my dad and uncles bantering and telling stories,” he says. “That’s how I learned what it meant to be a man in the world.” Ink tries to recapture that essence in his work, trawling through photography archives or taking pictures of strangers on the streets. His paintings mostly portray Black people at leisure: playing musical instruments or card games, sitting at bars or lounging in beds.
Born and raised in Brighton, Ink – real name Toby Grant – works from his studio in south London, near the green refuge of Burgess Park. “It’s the nicest room I’ve ever rented,” he says of the light-filled space that he shares with his girlfriend, Gloria, who is also a painter. “It’s much nicer than our flat.”
Ink’s work is characterised by opaque blocks of colour and vivid interiors, such as 60s-style diners and artists’ studios-settings that are “a mix of imaginary places, based on looking through the window in a shop in Peckham or hearing a story from [his] dad back in the day”. His figures have enlarged hands, blurry faces and fragmented, cubist bodies, achieved through a combination of photography, oil or acrylic, airbrushing and collaged fabric.
Painting in an ad-hoc manner, Ink starts with the faces and building out the rest of the seene. He cites Pablo Picasso and Romare Bearden as two of his major influences, adding that working with his sister, collage artist Jazz Grant, after dropping out of his graphic design degree was a hugely formative experience.
Hair is a recurring theme in Ink’s work, with his 2025 self-titled solo exhibition at Saatchi Yates featuring two large-scale paintings of a barbershop and a hair salon respectively. “It’s a fun way to accentuate a character for me,” he says. “As a kid, the only time I met my grandad he gave me an Afro comb. I went home and combed my hair out as big as I could.” His elder sister worried that his classmates would tease him at school, but he “didn’t give a shit”.
In addition to being a painter, Ink has a musical practice and has recently started making demos again. Music had taken a backseat while he worked on exhibitions, but his passions have always existed in parallel. “Whenever I was writing raps, I was also drawing on the pages,” he says. “I started producing my own music around the same time I started painting, as opposed to just rapping on my mates’ beats.”
Whatever the medium, Ink’s art is bound by the same instinctive, experimental approach that has already become his signature.
