An Artist, Emerging

Hey folks, and welcome to another blog post about *feelings*. Please keep your hands and arms inside the tab at all times as we don’t want you to inadvertently catch them. Here's a patch I embroidered at North West Zine Fest.

I’m quite honoured that your eyes are falling on my blog today; a place that, for an illustrator, feels quite thin on the illustration content. I guess writing here almost acts as a way to contextualise and explain that, but I’d also love to return to scrapbooking more and sharing drawing in a more online-journal-type way rather than hanging around on instagram. Honestly, I think this post is a precursor to more of that, and more drawing generally, so thank you for bearing with me over the years, particularly as I express feelings of being lost every couple of months without even making that many nice new pictures to sweeten the pill.

What Kills Creativity?

I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but my practice is dying.

Despite its relatively healthy exterior it's something I've suspected for a while and have begun applying various holistic approaches to soothe and calm it — the odd hard-fought personal project here and there, writing personal development funding bids in my head in a dream-like state, staying up all night drawing for ink-fucking-tober. In the last few years I've swung everywhere between thinking I NEED TO QUIT MY JOB IMMEDIATELY AND JOIN THE ROYAL DRAWING SCHOOL and Oh well, it's actually fine, I can draw when I'm old! I'll enjoy that...

Like, I think I most recently started to make peace with the fact it was dying — sad and confused, sure — but accepting, like the final scene of Lord of the Rings as the lads wave Frodo off on his little boat.

Over the last few weeks the urgency of my personal work as part of the #ArtistsMeanBusiness residency I've set up at Impact Hub Birmingham this month has become clear. This is going to take more than a nice bath and some ointment, it's going to require some fundamental diagnosis and probably a bit of surgery. I've been writing trying to make sense of all of this like a person possessed this week so far. Using an exercise from d-school, I am now in the process of assessing the condition of my practice, and what I can do to treat it before it’s too late.

One Extraordinary Thing

If you could do one extraordinary thing, what would it be?

It's 2am and I'm listening to Lou Reed's Transformer album (a Christmas present from my pa), doing a pretty ordinary thing for me at this hour of writing a phrase down on a post-it note and thinking - there is something in this; or rather, here we go again, there's something in me. It's like a kind of itchy thought that makes me get out a fresh sheet of paper or a notebook or in this case, go straight to my fucking blog like Carrie fucking Bradshaw.

So, hi, and welcome to this new and exciting episode of Baked Beans & the City.