#0023 DEAN MELBOURNE - THE ARTIST ADVISOR

Welcome to The Creative Nowhere Land Podcast.

Sometimes in life, we could all do with a little advice, especially as artists and creatives. Well, on this episode, we're joined by someone who does just that, The Artist Advisor, Dean Melbourne.

As a successful artist himself with multiple solo shows under his belt, Dean has gained both the knowledge and experience in the art world that he now shares with other artists and creatives to help guide them on their journey.

In this episode, we discuss Dean's extensive career, the highs, the lows, and everything in between that gives Dean the social proof to be able to actually be the artist advisor. 

We also talk about the grifters or snake oil salesmen in the art industry. What success looks like as an artist, identity, and imposter syndrome. Why the best way to learn is to teach, and also why it's so important to develop not just the art, but ourselves as well.

Not only that, Dean kindly gives us his Top 5 Tips for Artists and Creatives that will be useful, whatever stage of the journey you are on. So get your pens at the ready, as you may want to take some notes, as this episode is full of inspiring stuff. Hope you enjoy it!

Check out the links below to Dean's Website and Social Media as you listen.

THE ARTIST ADVISOR WEBSITE: https://www.deanmelbourne.co.uk/

THE ARTIST ADVISOR INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/the_artist_advisor/

DEAN MELBOURNE ARTIST WEBSITE: https://www.deanmelbourneartist.com/

DEAN MELBOURNE ARTIST INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/deanmelbourneartist/

Transcript

Introduction to The Artist Advisor

Speaker 1 0:03

Hello everyone and welcome to the Creative Noelle Land podcast. Sometimes in life we could all do with a little advice, especially as artists and creatives. Well, on this episode, we're joined by someone who does just that the artist advisor, dean Melbourne. As a successful artist himself, with multiple solo shows under his belt, dean has gained both the knowledge and experience in the art world that he now shares with other artists and creatives to help guide them on their journeys. In this episode, we discuss Dean's extensive career, the highs, the lows and everything in between that give Dean the social proof to be able to actually be the artist advisor.

Dean's Top Five Tips for Artists

Speaker 1 0:50

We also talk about the grifters, or snake oil salesmen in the art industry, what success looks like as an artist, identity imposter syndrome, why the best way to learn is to teach and also why it's so important to develop not just the art but ourselves as well, but not only that. Dean kindly gives us his top five tips for artists and creatives that will be useful whatever stage of the journey that you're on and, let's face it, that's why you've really shown up. That's what you're interested in. Anyway, you can check out the links to Dean's website and social media while you're listening to the podcast, of course, but this episode is full of inspiring stuff, so get your pens at the ready, as you may want to take some notes, but now let's straight into it. Have you got maybe like a list of top tips that you can give our creative noah land audience from your years of being said art advisor?

Speaker 2 2:15

yeah, probably I have a funny relationship with top tips, but I think we can do it anyway, and then maybe we'll talk about why top tips are sometimes problematic. But I I guess my top tip is about developing yourself as well as the art at the same time. So I meet many people for whom the art is very well developed, but the social interactions or the stuff that goes on around it is difficult because they've not done as much work on themselves as they have on their work. Some people are really well developed personally, but they haven't put their hours in on their work. So, yeah, develop yourself and the work. See that as two distinct areas.

Speaker 2 2:56

Look after your relationships would be tip two. With who? So professional relationships with your peers, with clients, potential clients, with people potentially who are in some way further down the line than you, that act as kind of mentors or advisors, and particularly the people who are your cheerleaders. Look after those relationships, bear them in mind, appreciate how much value they can bring and look after them. So that's the two. And then number three I would urge people to constantly see themselves as students, constantly with the attitude of what could I learn? What's not quite right? So a cynical attitude about your own work at times is really useful to push you on.

Speaker 1 3:45

Would that be simply for the artist, rather than because you don't want to be portraying yourself as the student to necessarily galleries or potential buyers?

Speaker 2 3:53

Yeah, absolutely so in, of course, what we're taught a lot about being confident outwardly about the work and backing it, and absolutely have to back what you do. But I think we can have an internal dialogue. The fundamentals can always get better, but you can always communicate more clearly visually. You can always learn to understand line better or tone better or color better. There's always something that you're probably not quite doing as well as is possible. So continue learning and also, to a certain extent, I do think that people that understand the arts really understand that there has to be progress anyway.

Speaker 2 4:30

This notion that you present yourself as the finished article, that line doesn't really wash. So, yeah, that's three, isn't it going to go for five? I would say, to invite critical voices into your studio or into the work. You can't necessarily your physical studio, because some people live not around other artists, but there are so many ways now online or digitally, to get good critical voices into the studio that are going to challenge, but that takes quite a lot of bravery for the artist, the creative, to go look at me, look at my work.

Speaker 1 5:06

What do you think?

Speaker 2 5:07

It can do. It doesn't always have to be quite that conversation. I think it's a really great place where your peers can play a part. So even if it's being brave enough to say I've just finished a piece and invite three peers to come and look at it and give them free reign to say what they think and take on the position of everything's learning nothing there's no offence and also I suppose we have to give humans credit.

Speaker 1 5:31

Most people aren't mean.

Speaker 2 5:33

No, they're not mean. In fact, I would say the opposite. I would say the arts have become a very nice place, which is why critical input is so important. And social media accelerates this, of course, because it seems that everything's framed in a positive way. So the worst that happens is that people don't comment yeah, but there's not as much critical engagement as there used to be, and there's lots of confidence building, and the word support comes up a lot.

Speaker 1 6:02

That's interesting, isn't it? Because again, 20, 20 plus years ago, when I was at university, you would have to go into your crit and everyone in the 30 people in your photography course or your visual communication or your art-based class would say what they think and in those situations, interpersonal relationships, whatever, some people could be dickheads.

Speaker 2 6:23

Yeah, they really could, and it wasn't necessarily constructive. It was almost legendary, wasn't it? The art room create, uh, for make people crying, or it was almost like. It was like a thing to be feared. To a certain extent, it was true, and some people that haven't had that journey haven't experienced that yeah, through our education, and perhaps they've come to art in later life from a background of accounting or something They've never had that.

Speaker 2 6:46

Yeah, and we generally live in a culture where criticism is difficult to take. There's more offences found in things, I think, than there used to be. So having 30 people in a room egged on by your tutors, it's a difficult experience and it depends on your personality, but actually it's really good.

Speaker 1 7:05

Like you say, allowing that critical voice into your work.

Speaker 2 7:08

Yeah, it is difficult. And then I would say that is one of the distinctions often between clients who come to me thinking they want to be in inverted commas a proper artist. That's one of the kind of briefs that I get from clients and then actually that is probably beyond what they really want when it comes to the reality of it allowing critical voices.

Speaker 1 7:32

That would be number. Was that number four? Yeah, one more. And then I think we should talk about what qualifies you to be the art advisor yeah.

Speaker 2 7:40

So what's number five? I would say, and I'm surprised myself as I'm even saying this. Number five is to, at times, make things less personal by treating your artistic identity or seeing it through a business lens. And I surprised myself by saying that because really I'm a romantic about being an artist and I got into the arts as a romantic, as someone that really believed in that stuff. And yet if I look at my own story and see where I made, progress probably was at the point where I started to detach a little bit emotionally and started to see it even in a slightly more businesslike way, and I think we can definitely go into that when we say more about your story.

Speaker 1 8:31

There's some fantastic gems of. I know you don't like to call them top tips, but I think the audience that listens to this podcast will appreciate those a lot and will take them on.

Speaker 2 8:41

We're trying to avoid the social media hack. There are no hacks to this, but there are general areas of attention you can pay on.

Art Advisor vs Art Coach: Avoiding the Grift

Speaker 1 8:51

Does that lead us nicely on to? Why do you call yourself the art advisor rather than all these people online, exactly like you say, who are the art coach or the guaranteed 10 grand's worth of art sales? I do this follow these simple methods and you will sell, for so is that? Does that go back to your romanticism?

Speaker 2 9:12

well, it goes back to a need really for um clarity and telling the truth. I call myself the artist advisor because so coaches. Their primary job is to help someone come to the right answer themselves. A mentor is always from the position of having been somewhere that the client hasn't and helping them perhaps not make the same mistakes or go do things a little bit quicker. The benefit of experience and I use those things at times, but oftentimes I'm more opinionated sometimes and I'm more of a teacher. So some of my background is teaching and essentially the attitude that I take is that if I've got an opinion about something or some advice, as long as I'm listening carefully and openly, I can save people an awful lot of time by telling them that you're their critical voice, essentially at times. Yeah, and sometimes that is in an art sense and sometimes that is in a, I would say, business stroke, personal sense. Sometimes there's some things that are very obvious in terms of someone's behaviour. Say that I see blocking their progress.

Speaker 2 10:29

Do you have any examples of that? Yeah, so it could be. So someone could say they're very nervous to exhibit and so they build up a lot of walls around that. So then they might say, oh, I'm not at the place where I could get a gallery yet, or I could rent a space, or I could apply to be in this or that, and I might be saying it'd be really good to show some of your work, and to avoid it, they will inflate it. I might see that they're doing that, and so what I really want to say to them which is what I can because I'm an advisor is why don't we just do a show in your garage and invite some people? And it shortcuts that to minimize the impact.

Speaker 2 11:12

So, yeah, I'm really skilled coaches with really good understanding of how to get people to places will do that. It will still take some time and, of course, the benefit of coaching is that if people have the idea not you, generally it's. However, I find that if your client trusts you and is fully on board to develop, you can speed up that process a little bit. But I'm not playing a game of trying to get the client to a place. I don't really have time for that, and also I don't love taking money from people and I value their money. I value that they're paying for the service, so I want to give them the information.

Speaker 1 11:48

But there's never been a temptation to go. Ah, I'll get some more clients in by going. I can guarantee that I'll sell your work. The reason I say that is because I've got this crossover between commercial photography and my artwork and when I first started trying to explore some more, I found some of these art coaches online and I thought, oh, I'm interested, I wonder what they have to say. They're all selling some sort of course or, dare I say, snake oil salesman, get rich quick off your art thing. And I bought a couple and, I'll be completely honest, they weren't hugely expensive. But I read the three that I bought and there was nothing groundbreaking in there to me that I don't think anyone could have learned from. Potentially listening to this podcast or potentially any season one of the creative noah land podcasts, yes, so how do I say this? You're not there for the grift. You're there to try and make artists better. Yes, not necessarily that there are. But are there practice there, business acumen there?

Speaker 2 12:48

Yes, and it is a constant self-awareness battle of trying to run a business and tell people what the results of working with me could be, versus making promises or grifting. So there's a constant self-checking of that and at times I would say that it makes me think about not doing it at all, because there is, especially over the last two or three years, the proliferation of people offering this is huge. Essentially, what seems to have happened is that artists have very quickly figured out that if they're in any way a chapter ahead in the book on anything, then they can teach that and, of course, I'm absolutely fine with artists making a living, however they need to make it. But I think that they're often built on very specific tricks or processes or particular things that people can do, which is fine. You want to teach how you build a landscape? Teach that. If people want to pay for that's great.

Speaker 2 13:49

Where it gets difficulties, where people are promising big career jumps, it's either sales or getting the gallery. Despite the all of the changes in the arts, they're still the two things that really are the, I guess, the fishing lure that works for people, and so I don't talk about that in my marketing and there is no guarantee that if you work with me, you'll sell more work. There's no guarantee that you will suddenly attract a curator or a gallerist. However, I suppose that what's implicit in what I do is that I believe that if you pay attention to some of the things that I'm going to help you focus on, you will become in inverted commas a better artist, and naturally, that could happen. If you want to sell a particular number of pounds worth of art, then that is a completely different conversation. Then that is a completely different conversation. The difficulty is that it's been wrapped up as an arts development conversation, when actually it's an online business conversation.

Speaker 1 14:52

Yeah, it's a sales funnel, it's attract attention.

Speaker 2 14:56

Yeah, but I suppose the benefit that the people that sell to artists have is because of social media. Aspiration is high, entitlement to success is very high. So it would seem that to most people, if they're not having success, there's probably an answer that they haven't come across a trick or a particular piece of wisdom that will unlock what everyone else seems to have. And it's just not the case. And some of these programs are run by very respectable organizations. Either way, there isn't a secret. There's nothing they're going to say to you. That is the piece of information.

Speaker 1 15:35

And what works for one artist creative won't work for another artist creative. You might be hugely introvert so it's very difficult to go and push your networking skills.

Speaker 2 15:46

So yeah, so you look at an artist and you'll see their self-development journey, their confidence levels, their ability to communicate, their geography, the type of work that they make, the type of success that they see as success. Actually, isn't this one size fits all thing, can we?

Speaker 1 16:04

talk about that a little bit. I think it's interesting. Do you still think the gallery holds the esteem for artists that you think it should in 2025, or because, realistically, we live in a time that it's almost much easier to do it on your own without a gallery?

The Gallery Relationship and Social Proof

Speaker 2 16:20

in a sense, yeah, so yes, and I think it does still hold. It holds a massive kind of draw and to a certain extent, as an artist myself, I would have to concede that it still does for me too, and I think that's partly because, in a business sense, it makes much more sense to have a third party talking about how good you are, or if a gallery takes you and puts you in frees art fair. It's an unspoken third party endorsement, social proofing, social proofing yeah, absolutely, it's a great phrase. And that is like catnip to artists. Even the ones that will profess they don't need or want that, get their heads turned at times by that idea. And then, of course, but is that?

Speaker 1 17:07

only dependent on, say, the level of the art fair or the level of the gallery.

Speaker 2 17:11

Yeah, and the difficulty will always be that wherever you start your social proofing journey, wherever you get that social proof, there'll always be something just above that you are still not approved for.

Speaker 1 17:24

Yeah, you get into Frieze Art Fair, but Saatchi Gallery's invited someone else.

Speaker 2 17:29

Or you'll be in the very top art fair or maybe you'll be on a really great stand with a great gallery at Art Basel, but you'll be the lowest selling artist. We're human and it plays on those insecurities and it plays on some of that ego need that we have, but also in a business sense.

Speaker 1 17:45

often artists are just relieved to not have to deal with money and also, sometimes, artists can sometimes not be the best talkers about their work, communicators about the work they might be great on canvas. So, like you say, having that third party endorsement, that third party voice, that's going out and they're talking about you, you don't have to do it.

Speaker 2 18:04

Yeah, and of course, the competition in that area is being amplified all the time by people who are more and more adept at things like social media, presenting themselves in a particular way, coming across as very slick in the studio.

Speaker 1 18:18

Their studios look great, their clothes look great, they talk great, the lighting's great and it sounds like you're describing the Creative No-Bland podcast here all style, no content.

Speaker 2 18:27

Well, yeah, it is that all the gear, no idea, and the truth is there's a bitterness thing that happens then and people go that's all rubbish, Because they can't compete. They go that's nonsense. And then, of course, when you look at it, there are times when there is all the gear and an actual idea, which is an uncomfortable truth for people, because now we're not only competing with people that are pretending to be good, but they actually are and they can do the other stuff.

Speaker 1 18:57

That's an interesting factor as well in terms of artists and creatives' egos. I saw a funny whatever it was, a reel or something the other day and it was an artist starting his work. And then it was basically this comparison, because on social media we can see some incredible artists and you're about to pick up your brush and start painting a blank canvas and you flick through instagram and you see someone who's made this 14 foot canvas with the most beautiful colours and detail and you think, why am I bothering? That comparison culture? It must be a big blocker. Well, it was always difficult.

Speaker 2 19:31

I think it was even pre-social media For those of us with what I would say a troublesome ego and I'm definitely one of those which is probably why I understand people's struggles and I can see their behaviors sometimes is because I'm certainly not exempt from this. I've really struggled with it. I remember someone saying to me Uni, are you happy with your work? And me going not really. And they go. What are you comparing it to? I go Frank Auerbach Caravaggio, this is the bar right. Because if I'm doing this, why would I not bother?

Speaker 1 20:03

But were you comparing it to them or were you comparing it to the idea of what you could create in your brain?

Speaker 2 20:09

So in my brain I could make a Caravaggio, but my hands couldn't. That's what I mean.

Speaker 1 20:14

You in your brain, go. This is what this piece is going to, because I do it all the time.

Speaker 2 20:18

Yeah, the thing, yeah, I was competing with the artists that have been, and now, of course, we think about how they end up in the canon. Artists love art, libraries and creative libraries are great and you sit in there and you're looking and because you're pushing all the time and you're aspiring to things and that can get dangerous, but for most people it's like it pulls you along now, if you fast forward to now, and it's so confusing that people are now not even only competing with artistic talent, but they're competing with an ability to understand tech or they're competing with an ability to style.

Speaker 1 20:56

Again. Like you say someone, yeah, be deemed as successful in inverted commas because they've got a hundred thousand followers for their art piece. That you can't really work. Yeah at what they do, but they're like you say, they're very good at their social media.

Speaker 2 21:09

They play the game, they have the hook yeah, and so one of the things that's changed and evolved and continues to change is the motivation to be an artist at all and what success looks like. And the mid-level often is the most difficult. So people know how to aspire up to the middle and then the bit from there gets really difficult. There's a big kind of pool of artists in the middle of the game. What?

Speaker 2 21:36

does that look like the middle of the game. Well, it can be anything, I suppose, depending on what your idea of success is Selling relatively successfully or frequently, at say, an affordable art fair. Maybe I would think of that as being in the middle of the game that we're playing. And then there are many galleries that again try and I think about a sliding scale and at one end of it there's a concern for art and at one end of it there's a concern for money. And there are many galleries that try and straddle the middle ground of that. They will profess to, and some of them genuinely do have a real concern for the arts, but they've also got a real concern for business and for obvious reasons, and they want to keep the gallery open, presumably.

Speaker 2 22:24

Yeah, absolutely. And it tends to be that there's a lot of confusion or camouflaging, one and the other around that, particularly people professing to be very much about the art when actually it's pure business and there's not very much interest in the art. And then, of course, the artist comes along, whose concern often not always is very high at the art end and very low on the financial end, except for the fact that they need to pay their rent.

Speaker 1 22:53

Yeah, and then they end up working with a gallery whose concern is further back on that sliding scale and there's a mismatch and frustrations happen and things like that but that goes back to, like you say, what people define as success, because there might be those artists in the middle of the road or even solely, dare I say, it's social media artists these days, because we do live in a time where, yeah, some hundred thousand count artist makes abstract pictures, but they've done really well in tech and they're selling lots. They don't need the gallery so there are two.

Speaker 2 23:27

There are two things going on there, aren't there. One is that what's likely is that in a hundred years we might look back and the most important artists aren't making what we traditionally think of as art at all. In fact, they may be purely social media operators, and that may become art in a hundred years, and people will see that will be the art that will be.

Speaker 1 23:48

We see the caravaggio in. They're going to go back and look at wow, look at this person on social media.

Speaker 2 23:53

They had 200 000 followers making yeah, this and it could be that they would. Yeah, they were making something that anything frankly nothing to do with anything that we consider art. Now that could be the art that. What's the phrasing in the film basquiat everyone's looking for van gogh's ear is that could be that thing. So we need to not lose sight of that, because artists sometimes can be very and myself included, quite narrow in my ideas about the arts.

Speaker 1 24:19

So for me, that's a certain again romanticism. Yeah, snobbery, shall we say.

Speaker 2 24:24

Absolutely, and I've been guilty of being very snobby about painting, for example, because my education was in painting and I had this belief that painting was the top of the art form tree, if you like. So the truth is that we don't really know at the moment whether some of the people that are presenting brilliantly as artists really are or not.

Speaker 1 24:47

there's a really interesting kind of game going on there is that a good point to go back a little bit talking about your background and painting and things like that? What qualifies you dean to be the art advisor? This is where we have to go back and talk about your own art career.

Speaker 2 25:03

Yes, and this is really difficult, this notion that you know I overcome a constant battle internally about nobody should really listen to me. There's no good reason to listen to me any more than anyone else. The imposter syndrome.

Speaker 2 25:15

You mean it's kind of imposter syndrome, I think. I like to think that it's self-awareness really, because you know, I work with some, both professionally and as clients, alongside some incredible people that have achieved, in many ways, a lot more than I have, because you know, I work with some both professionally and as clients, but alongside some incredible people that have achieved in many ways, a lot more than I have. And I have to remind myself sometimes that it's a communication issue and there's an ability to pass on knowledge, and I probably have to acknowledge that there's a good chance that my real calling is as someone that passes on knowledge rather than an artist myself that inspires others yeah, that's a constant thing that I have to battle with.

Speaker 2 25:51

So what qualifies me? I always tell people that it's not about me. It's about the things that I've learned, and I have this always had this kind of delight in learning things and telling other people about them. But I don't know where that comes from. But I maybe started to see the joy that my tutors at college would have of passing that on and I go oh, that's really interesting. So I've always, if I'd learned something, I'd want to tell someone almost straight away. The best way to learn is to teach.

Speaker 2 26:19

Yeah, maybe it's like I get excited about new bits of information or new skills, or so I started by. So I did a painting degree at wolverhampton. You did fine art at wolverhampton.

Speaker 1 26:31

Yeah, what's the journey into that? And let's go into it. What sort of work are you creating and what was your mentality? I know there's a lot wrapped up in this, but yeah, yeah yeah, so presumably you thought you were going to be an artist when you came out of university.

Speaker 2 26:45

Yeah, and I was at university when the YBAs had the Sensation show, so it was really impactful. Before that I'd ended up at art college, essentially because I was the kid at school that drew and that kind of formed part of my identity as an artist. And then when I left school, I remember talking to an art teacher and he said you should go to art college, You'll like it there, You'll like the people. I was like okay, so I had to go in Not because of your talent.

Speaker 2 27:16

You'll just like the people. Yeah, you'll like it there. You'll like the people.

Speaker 1 27:20

That's interesting.

Speaker 2 27:21

Yeah, it was interesting. So I thought, well, I'll go, and I had to. I did an interview and then I had to do what was called, well, this lower level b-tech, and that was the start of my journey and I loved it. And he was right, I loved the people and it seems to me that the main difference between art students or people that gravitate towards the arts is sincerity people that gravitate towards the arts is sincerity.

Speaker 2 27:46

Okay, can you say more about that? Yeah, so I was always a very kind of feelingy person and I was always overly sincere and romantic about feelings, about thoughts. I thought they were important. I thought my ideas were important and I was. I suppose the word is earnest was really earnest about everything, and my mates, for the most part, were like most people, most lads. They were brilliant piss takers and hilariously funny brutal, but sincerity was not okay. It was the worst thing to be about anything, let alone something as flowery as a painting.

Speaker 1 28:26

How did they react to that?

Speaker 2 28:28

They called me my nickname. Weirdly, they called me the thespian and I had nothing to do with acting or drama, so his nickname was the thespian. Yeah, I was overly emotive about things and so when I got to college and I saw other people with being sensitive and earnest in their ideas and I suppose the big conversation growing up here was the idea, I suppose, that I constantly faced that caring about your own thoughts and ideas was like having ideas above your station, really a little of who do you think you are, kind of attitude, and it manifested in for the longest time in me having a really difficult relationship with being from the black country, for example, when everyone seemed quite proud of it and loved it. I was a bit like all right, I even thought about having elocution lessons at one point to get rid of the accent, which I think speaks a lot about this desire to change myself. It's funny.

Speaker 1 29:19

You say that because in the podcast with pj ellis a very Brummie we talk about that, how there's something about being from the Midlands and the accent and this, that and the other. That are we the victims of our own.

Speaker 2 29:32

Deprecation. I think yeah, self-deprecating ninjas right.

Speaker 1 29:38

Self-deprecating ninjas?

Speaker 2 29:40

Yeah, and it is difficult and it's real and it will happen that if you step outside of your comfort zone, that you may face Is that what you sort of meant when you talked about the geography of an artist? I think so, yeah, that and their background and their understanding of their belief of what can be achieved. You know, there's this thing of people like me. Don't do things like that. We've all got those and obviously they're often sorry.

Speaker 1 30:06

they're geographically linked People from here don't really do things like that, and I think that's very relevant because obviously I know the progression of your story a little bit more. Yeah, but shall we carry on that progression? Yeah, let's carry on the progression. It's definitely your…. So I was the arty kid, yeah. And then I got to college and I loved it. The thespian it wasn't the thespian, yeah but I wasn't very good.

Dean's Journey: From Art Student to Success

Speaker 2 30:28

really. My ideas were always far beyond what my hands could do skill-wise, and I didn't always have the patience to learn skills. But I really cared about these ideas and I got very into like. Being in the art library was gold for me. I started reading about Munch and Dali and I think I fell in love with the idea of being an artist as much as doing art.

Speaker 1 30:53

The persona that comes with being the artist.

Speaker 2 30:55

Yeah, and what that might allow you to, I suppose. I learned to do things with it that were okay, like. It meant that because I was often earnest and quite romantic, it meant that I could talk to the opposite sex quite well, which a lot of my mates, up to a point, struggled with, so that became, I suppose, a thing for me.

Speaker 2 31:18

It helps you get girls, you know. So yeah, I was. I was like I was always falling in love because that's where all the feeling was, that's where all that, all that earnestness could live, and I liked that. I didn't realize at the time. I was looking back so, yeah, I did college and then I didn't do great. And then I had a moment where my tutor he said do you want to go to university? And I ended up thinking I better had. So we had a meeting where we went through my portfolio of what was three years at college then and made a yes pile and a no pile. And we were making a pile. How was that?

Speaker 1 31:50

Yeah, well, I thought it was great. That's the crit, isn't it? Yeah, that's the crit. This is the work that's going to work.

Speaker 2 31:55

So there was a pile getting bigger and bigger and I was thinking, oh, this is going quite well, but let me guess, let me guess. Yeah, that was the no pile. So my tutor said grab that, follow me. And he walked me downstairs out of the building around the back and made me throw it in a skip. Oh, not even keep. Even the portfolio went in the skip.

Speaker 1 32:16

Wow, that's quite extreme.

Speaker 2 32:18

Yeah, and then he, but then he for life lessons, then he followed this up, that up with. I think you can do a lot better than this.

Speaker 1 32:25

I'm going to teach you to paint so he must have seen something in you too yeah, I think so.

Speaker 2 32:31

I think so. And in the next three months I developed an idea for a project. I think the film usual suspects had just come out, you know that visual with them all against the thing. Well, I got this idea of doing that, but painting human representations of the seven deadly sins. Okay, interesting. So they're going to be life-size black and white paintings. And he said here's the paper, here's some black acrylic, a tub of white emulsion, here's my brushes. I'm going to help you do this. And that's what I did. I did that. What did?

Speaker 2 33:05

he teach you in that time that you didn't know about painting, to help you achieve that collection he wasn't so much that he taught me things I hadn't been taught before, it's that he showed me again. He would literally take my brush and go that action like because it turns out that I'm really good mimic, I can learn by mimicking quite well and I get it. So it was one to one Visual learner. Visual learner, yeah, really kind of urgent, quick, almost like too quick for a lot of people, kind of physical, yeah, and I go, okay, then he'd leave me and next day I'd have done some and he'd go, yeah, that's it, maybe a bit more this boom, yeah, great, and it's suddenly I could.

Speaker 2 33:47

Huge influence for you then, massive, yeah, massive influence. And and he's still a painter I should say his name, his name's andrew sylvester, and he's an amazing painter and just incredible work. And the other thing that he did for me was before that he had an exhibition and he'd taken me and a couple of other students to the private view to see it and there were these set of incredible paintings he was painting gardens at the time and he was. There was text in them that you could just about make out oil paintings and there were people there looking at them and asking him what they were about and I just fell in love with the whole thing, you know, so not just the art.

Speaker 2 34:23

The idea again of yeah, well, the art center of attention being the sort of being the center of attention. But also his art was very beautiful and very sincere. So I loved this beauty and this sincerity about his work. It wasn't just that he was center of attention, it was that people were genuinely interested in what he had to say about things because of the work. So in some sense, I saw that the art gave him a platform where his opinion started to matter, and that was really interesting to me, because I felt like someone whose opinion didn't matter ever. So I suddenly thought, oh, maybe that's how I, if I want to be listened to ever, maybe it's that. So his art was speaking, but also he was able to speak. He was backed up by the fact that he'd made this thing.

Speaker 1 35:14

He had the social proof by being the artist who had the opening to show you, perhaps, how you could be.

Speaker 2 35:22

And artists have a social proof. So there's this idea that artists, there are all sorts of social proofing. There's an authority that comes with an ability to be an artist, particularly a very good one. So anyway, I saw all of that. I thought that sounds great. I got taught to paint. My confidence was up a bit, and the last bit of that was that he wrote to the head of painting at wolverhampton who'd been his tutor, and said dean's portfolio is pretty thin, but there's something there. I think you should give him a shot.

Speaker 1 35:55

And he did so they must have recognized that as well. Yeah, what do you think they were seeing? I think it it was just care. I think I cared they could see that you wanted to learn, you wanted to progress, you wanted to do this.

Speaker 2 36:08

I think I spoke like an artist long before I could make art. The thespian, yeah, absolutely. So I got to uni anyway and there were maybe 45 people in my year and was that a turning point in terms of you?

Speaker 1 36:21

You've had this sort of one-to-one painting tuition. Was that a turning point in terms of you? You've had this sort of one-to-one painting tuition when you went to uni. You're surrounded by people presumably of equal or similar.

Speaker 2 36:30

I would say that I was about the 45th good painter, really yeah. Is that self-deprecation again? No, no, I don't think so. I think that's pretty accurate.

Speaker 1 36:38

But then would that not have been the opinion that probably most of those other people sat there going wow, I'm the worst painter here because of that Some but not all Inner self-critic we all have I don't think it would.

Speaker 2 36:49

Lots of them were pretty confident, Really. Lots of them were older than me and also we got to our first assessment in our first year and everyone's grades came out and mine were terrible. So it's confirmed. I knew that I wasn't doing that.

Speaker 1 37:00

How does that work, Because again you're creating art to a marking criteria at university.

Speaker 2 37:05

Sort of, yeah, it's not necessarily all about.

Speaker 1 37:08

oh, the final piece is fantastic, dean, but you didn't do those three sketchbooks of prep work, of where you decided and where those influences came from.

Speaker 2 37:16

I hear you, I hear you, but the self-evaluation would say that there wasn't anything that was going well. At that time again, I reverted back to having really high ideas and couldn't manifest any of them. Nothing was coming out. It went terribly and, yeah, I almost tried to take on too much all the time again. It just didn't go well.

Speaker 2 37:36

And the other thing that wasn't going well was physically. It was like I'd forgotten everything I'd learned at college. I couldn't paint again again. Why, I don't know. I think it was to do with the environment. I didn't feel comfortable. I was in a bigger space, I was tight, I think, and I would try and accelerate my ideas and what I was doing too far. So I'd stretch myself and then therefore make nothing. So I did this for two or three years. So the first a I ever got in anything ever was my very last module at uni. Oh, so I went from d's all the way up to a's at the end and by the third year I got it and I was understanding it and I was flying and up to that point.

Speaker 1 38:17

Do you think that had just been a paralysis through want of perfection?

Speaker 2 38:21

yes, I think so. So what changed that in your final? My hands caught up a bit so I was able to start producing ideas that I had. I wanted to be gary hume, because to me, the most romantic painter of that yba thing. So I wanted to use interior paint gloss and but the conversation was what's going on here? This, this paint is about domesticity. It's about certain spaces. Certain colours have certain contextual ideas. I just wanted to use it because it was sexy and drippy. So there was this constant argument with my tutors about this idea of truth to materials. But I figured out a way of doing a thing. What I figured out was it meant that I didn't have to paint properly to be good, what does that?

Speaker 1 39:09

mean.

Speaker 2 39:10

Well. So what I ended up doing was I would take overly earnest paintings, I would trace it, I projected it, I drew it using silicon sealer, so it was like a raised line. And then those raised lines I would then fill with different blends of paint and then I'd hang it with light and it would cast shadows. So the shadow would make the drawing Wow. And what I made for my final show looked really interesting. It was all white on white. It was very beautiful, but it required no ability to paint in a traditional sense, no ability to model or represent. I just figured out how to make what looked like contemporary art.

Speaker 1 39:52

So why was that the only project that got you the a at university?

Speaker 2 39:56

because I think I understood how, to started to understand how to make something that looked like art and surely that's got some sort of subjectivity to it. Well, look like art.

Speaker 1 40:10

That your tutors must have gone. Oh, we agree, that looks like art.

Speaker 2 40:14

It's a very narrow set of objectives, really, because it looks like art that year amongst these people who are having this conversation that year, amongst these people who are having this conversation, of course, to the wider world. That I don't really know what it was, yeah, but what it did do was make me think about alternative materials and it made me think about different ways of drawing, and actually it would be easy to now go oh yeah, I just played the game, but I like everything. I really I believed it.

Speaker 1 40:41

I grew to believe you didn't play the game because you're like you only got the a at the end of the system.

Speaker 2 40:46

So you put yeah, I've got the a for the final show and I think it was because I wrote an all right statement about it that showed that I understood what I was doing. There is something to be said for really being able to understand what you're doing and the context of it and why you're doing it, and I still think that is important. But again, nothing's balanced, is it these days? So one thing's either terrible or it's brilliant oh yeah, this is terrible.

Speaker 1 41:08

That's brilliant and what?

Speaker 2 41:10

I'm trying to do all of the time and I think even the artist advisories hold that space but instead of throwing out the whole idea that the academicization of painting is really terrible and go completely the other direction, trying to hang out in the middle of that, because sometimes what that allows us to do is pick and choose.

Speaker 2 41:30

So if you say, for example, being able to write an essay about your own painting, no one should ever have to do that. It's a ridiculous thing to have to do. It's a terrible way of thinking about painting. That's a really great way of letting yourself off from having to do that work.

Speaker 1 41:45

Surely that essay that you might write would be a contributing factor into some of the stuff that you advise people on getting better about talking and understanding their own art yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 41:54

But some people, I think, use there's like a defensiveness that allows them to avoid things. There's always something that people have got a barrier yeah with they always in one camp or another.

Speaker 1 42:05

What sort of barriers did you think you had at university?

Speaker 2 42:09

Well, one of the barriers was that everyone seemed to be making work about quite difficult subjects, difficult personal subjects. That's a whole bit more confessional art, mental health, yeah yeah, and that seemed to help quite a lot. Firstly, it helps because it gives you a lot of drive to make that work, because it's important to you and it's part of your story. And secondly, it seemed to me that the tutors found that sometimes it's more difficult to criticise Not always, but sometimes and so I felt like I didn't really have anything particularly difficult to say, despite all these romantic feelings. Also, what I did was try to fight, and so I felt like I didn't really have anything particularly difficult to say.

Speaker 1 42:45

I was very Despite all these romantic feelings.

Speaker 2 42:46

Also, what I did was try to fight against it for a really long time and I went no, I'll tell you what I'm going to do. My life's pretty good, right. So I'm going to make work about pleasure. Why is there no positive art? I'm going to make some positive work and I thought I could defeat the system with that and then defeat the system with that, and then in the end I thought probably better get some problems. It's much easier if I get some problems, yeah, so I dug around. I started digging around for some problems and I found out that there was potentially an issue around gender and so I started cross dressing. So my final eight years in uni, I was cross-dressing a lot and thinking about my relationship with femininity and having some quite big epiphanies actually Can you say more about that, Because that's quite an extreme road to go down.

Speaker 1 44:06

exploring identity.

Speaker 2 44:08

Yeah. Well these things would have been present anyway, but I was keeping my eye out for my own psychology. I guess I started to ask questions about why I thought certain things.

Speaker 1 44:19

Such as why do I think this?

Speaker 2 44:22

Okay, so there's a link. So, on and off from being a student all the way through till now, I've really liked the view of figures that is almost dead on full length figure, with the view being from the waist middle. I've Botticelli did that in Primavera and things like that, so you're looking up at people on a stage. I always loved that and I started thinking about where that came from, where I first saw that and I remembered I had this memory. Oh, it was catalogs like freeman's catalogs, fashion catalogs that, yeah, that were my mom had. My mom was like a rep for one at one point or whatever. So we had these big catalogs around of women's clothes. Often I say women's clothes, they were all clothes, but I only looked at the women's sections and I got obsessed with these images of women in often like long floral dresses and in these very overtly feminine poses.

Speaker 2 45:13

I now realize and I started to remember this, that's really interesting, isn't it? And I started to think about what that was about. And then other memories started to come back to me of things that I'd done. I'd remembered trying on a pair of tights that I'd found when I was 11 or something, and then I was thinking about the fact that I wasn't that comfortable around like lads a lot and all of this stuff. So anyway it was there. It wasn't that I didn't invent it for stuff, so anyway it was there. It wasn't that I didn't invent it for the sake of the degree it was there, but I certainly probably started digging around a bit more than I would have otherwise, but was that something at the time?

Speaker 1 45:53

these big, bold, confident characters? Would this be the thing that? This sets me apart from everyone else? This is the thing that makes me different. It's not even necessarily about the art anymore no.

Speaker 2 46:02

So there's a certain element to all of my art, I think that is it's confessional and it's about this internal urge to go. Yeah, I'm gonna say that, I'm gonna say that. Okay, I don't know if I should say that about myself. Oh no, now I'm to say that, fuck it, I don't know if I should say that about myself. Oh no, now I'm going to say that about myself. It almost felt to me like that was my job, because if artists don't do that, if artists don't own up to stuff or deal with things, then it seemed to me that was the job of, that was the role for the artist.

Speaker 1 46:36

It's not very normal for an accountant to suddenly sit there and tell you about his no darkest feelings of identity no, but.

Speaker 2 46:43

But what I would think is that, through an artist doing that, people talk about artists speaking for them, or they see a thing and they go. Oh yeah, that really spoke to me and I I suppose I always felt like I wanted to be braver in terms of saying who I was and I was coming out of a place that felt very inhibited and I felt very scared to.

Speaker 1 47:05

So it felt like my job to challenge that, really. But yet what was the reaction to your cross-dressing? Was it positive? Negative, Because if you're scared about identifying Mixed, you know yeah.

Speaker 2 47:15

Mixed. So my nan, the most black country lady I ever met in my life she said said, oh, you make a fine wench, and wasn't really that fussed. You know my friends, some of them just chose never to speak about it. It was often ignored?

Speaker 1 47:30

were you going out and presenting yourself in every day?

Speaker 2 47:33

no I was like look I was very aesthetically minded so I was like I was very certain things I wouldn't do. But eddie is odd was starting to be a thing back then and so I started to just essentially mix and match male and female clothes a bit, and I do make a bit of makeup and I do the nails, but it wasn't and I wouldn't go down in the local pub like it.

Speaker 1 47:52

But when I was more sort of the new romantics.

Speaker 2 47:55

Well, I started looking at the new romantics and I was looking at that kind of gender thing and trying to figure it out for myself. So I was researching around what it was and quickly figured out that it for me was probably more of a fetish thing or more of a sensual thing. It was like a sex thing probably, but it didn't feel about the art.

Speaker 1 48:13

No, but it felt like my art should be about that, because that was the identity that you were living in.

Speaker 2 48:18

Because, that felt like the most urgent thing. Well, it was quite literal really, and I think this is often the case with younger artists, isn't? It is that their work is a bit more direct, a bit more literal. So I was chatting to a friend at uni and they said what you should do is go somewhere where no one knows you and we should do the full thing, and I'll photograph it, photograph you getting ready or whatever, and then you could use those photographs and that's so. That's what we did. She was doing an ma at this, went down to stay at Wimbledon College and stayed with her in her house and discovered that nothing's important in London, right?

Speaker 2 48:54

You're pretty invisible no matter what you do, which I certainly wasn't invisible in King's Winford. Again, down to that, geography, it's geography, yeah. So I was like, oh my God, you can do anything here, nobody cares, it's all great In London. It's very difficult to get noticed anyway. So we went down and took a bunch of photographs and I started making paintings from those photographs of me. It was hidden and it was yeah, but it was me.

Speaker 1 49:16

And what was the reaction to that from your tutors, from your peers? By?

Finding Success and Losing It: The Spiral

Speaker 2 49:21

this point. Yeah, I was at the point of just leaving uni and we had one tutor who was really supportive and I was working with two other artists. So we we put on a show in Birmingham and it was called Tell the Truth, shame the Devil, and the whole idea was that Shakespearean idea. In Hamlet they put on a play of a murder and say watch the eyes of the king and you'll see he recognizes it and you'll see his guilt. So we had this idea that actually if we show things to people and let people see them, they'll go.

Speaker 2 49:51

Oh yeah, I'll recognize, you'll see what resonates with yeah, so we did that and then our tutor invited us to put that show on again up in the studio in manchester and then after that everyone went their separate ways, stopped work, went to teaching then and it was like my career was oh, I'm gonna, you know did you have those aspirations?

Speaker 1 50:10

I have to go yeah I'm going to come out of university. I'm going to be an artist.

Speaker 2 50:14

Yes, and I knew that it would be a bit more difficult being in wolverhampton, but I still presumed that there'd be a version of sachi that would come along and go yeah, you next, then I'm off. So what actually happened? So what actually happened was, I bet, after about six months I started to realize I didn't have any money or a job. So I went begging for some work experience at my old college and uh, and this is where the element of giving back almost comes yeah.

Speaker 2 50:38

So I got how that started was. I was like this an assistant. It was great, loved it. I did that for two weeks and then they, they said, oh, someone's left and they teach the adult life drawing class, can you do it? And I kind of went no, I was like 22 and I'd been good in the life room, I'd been all right at that, but I was like I can't teach adults. That's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 51:00

Right, but anyway, what? Because of that imposter syndrome of being a 22-year-old student?

Speaker 2 51:04

Yeah, and anyway they took me into it and it went really well. And then over the years then I picked up more hours, I ended up a personal tutor and working on different courses and all of that stuff.

Speaker 1 51:15

So I ended up with a teacher, but were you still practicing any of your own art? Yeah, a bit.

Speaker 2 51:19

And again it's something that I talk to clients about now. There was an idea that being an art teacher is the perfect job to have as an artist. It was the worst for me job to have as an artist. It was the worst for me why? Because I tend to mimic what I'm around. I tend to be the product of the thing that I'm around.

Speaker 1 51:36

So when I started teaching b-tech, for example, all of my work looked like b-tech students work, oh really yeah, even though you'd had degree, education and the other because, yeah, I wasn't able to separate around yeah, those inputs, yeah, I suppose if we talk about that on the podcast, we are a result of our inputs and if all your inputs every day are BTEC artwork.

Speaker 2 51:56

Yeah, did you feel?

Speaker 1 51:57

like you were regressed.

Speaker 2 51:59

Yeah, I got worse. I got a lot worse outside of uni. I really regressed and I started to go oh you know, I did just play the game at uni and now there's nothing really. And I was a teacher. I did eight years and I loved it. But all I did even then was I taught all of the things that had been taught to me. I just repeated them and I was really good at that, Like I'd been told this, I understood it. Like life drawing, for example. I'd been taught to life draw. I was pretty good at it. I taught exactly the same lesson, almost word for word, that I'd had and got results, and it was great and I was like that's beautiful, I love that thing. And then eventually I started to run out of steam because, again, I was very earnest. So I would earnestly see 30 students a day and give them everything.

Speaker 1 52:52

All your energy goes into them. Yeah, absolutely, and you haven't left any room to recharge your own battery exactly that.

Speaker 2 52:55

So the way we worked was you'd give someone a tutorial and they'd invariably be working on a project and they go. I'm stuck, I've done this and this, but I don't know what to do next, and I would give every student 30 ideas in 15 minutes, and I'd do that 30 times easy in a way, but I'd come out just because you've given all your ideas away yeah, I'd have nothing.

Speaker 2 53:17

And now, looking back, I realized that the thing that I am good at this is one of the only things that I will say that I am good at. I'm good at developing ideas. I can develop ideas very quickly and understand why I've developed them. So, as an artist that is, I don't think the craft of what I do is particularly off the chart, but I'm good at ideas I'd say that's where that comes from, all those years spent in the art library I think it's about art knowledge.

Speaker 2 53:44

I learned while I was busy being not very good at art college. What was happening all of the time was teaches you a process, the process of brief research, development of ideas, narrowing down an idea, executing an idea and evaluating it and then starting again. Yeah, and for being an artist, it's the only education I can think of where the exact process of the education is mimicking, being that thing, because you're essentially, you're not an art student, you're being an artist, and I learned that and it made sense to me. And in the middle bit, the bit about developing ideas, is essentially a kind of sideways thinking, of link making and I don't know why, but I happen to be quite good at that, being able to go oh, if this, then it might be this, or then it could be this, the pattern, pattern recognition, isn't it?

Speaker 2 54:36

Yeah, not all artists who go on to be successful are good at that, because it's not really all that you need. And some really successful artists of like fantastic researchers or they're fantastic at the end product, so you can. There's, there are people, I think, that are better in different areas, that have success. In fact, sometimes being an ideas person often is linked to not completing things, because the idea is the exciting bit, so completion becomes a bit of a task really and again that paralysis of perfection.

Speaker 1 55:09

Yeah, you've got such an idea of what you want it to look like, absolutely absolutely yeah, so, yeah.

Speaker 2 55:15

So I taught and I loved it. I love passing on the knowledge but again, the world of it is quite small and I was very aware that whenever I voiced any artistic ambition of my own, the feeling I'd get back from the staff was don't have ideas above your station. You're very lucky to be an art teacher, you know. It was kind of cool. My parents were very proud of me and if I ever talked about wanting to move on, there was a bit of a like why would you want to do that? Why would you want to go to London, for example?

Speaker 2 55:42

It was a thing I heard said geography again why would you want to go there? It's like I didn't want to stay, I didn't want to just be a bit a little fish in a little pond that felt like a big fish. I wanted to. I knew there was more, I just didn't know how to get there really. So anyway, I left and I went and worked at wolverhampton museum and art gallery and that was liberating and showed me a completely different aspect of the arts, mostly one that I didn't love. But I guess working in the in that sector of, I guess, municipal galleries, is very restrictive. There's. There was lots of competition for people trying to make a career through there and oh, I see and it was very difficult and not enough jobs for too many people, lots of people taking themselves very seriously.

Speaker 2 56:33

But what I did do was I would spend most of my time showing around groups of young people like primary school kids all the way up to pensioners, and, firstly, having to show kids in there who didn't. They didn't hate it, but trying to get them to, trying to have a conversation with them about what it was, could be really difficult. But groups of pensioners, for example, would be very agitated by it and you'd almost end up find yourself almost defending contemporary art to them, which I didn't feel any need to particularly, but they'd be going why is this art? You know, it's those kind of difficult conversations and it's very challenging to them, and I would have to develop a kind of social ability to hold that conversation, have a sense of humour about it and try and move it on in some way.

Speaker 2 57:23

Not always successful, but it put me in the firing line of difficult conversations and people who were difficult to convince every day. So that was a good skill. I didn't love learning it, but I think I benefited from it. And then, yeah, I was still a practicing artist and it wasn't going that well. But I got an email from someone who was running a course that was funded by Business Link and it was a six-week, one-day-a-week business skills for creatives course, and they'd heard that I was an artist and someone had said oh, dean might be good for that.

Speaker 2 57:54

And so they emailed me several times asking me to go, and I kept saying no because why did you keep saying because I didn't at that time want to think about art as any kind of business, then I was going to be a romantic failure is what I thought was a much better idea.

Speaker 1 58:10

Oh, that's beautiful. A romantic failure, yeah.

Speaker 2 58:13

I got that mapped out ahead of me. To go get more and more angry and bitter Conform to the starving artist.

Speaker 1 58:20

Yeah, yeah, but at least I make my art.

Speaker 2 58:22

Unrecognized and, yeah, a chip on my shoulder, so I didn't want to think about it as business. And then this person kept sending me emails oh, just come to this session. And in the end I was like I think I might be able to get a day off work to do this. So I went and I was sat around with this group of people and there was a jewellery maker and an illustrator and someone that wanted to be a stand-up comedian all different kinds of soul traders and the lady who walked in to run. It was a lady called Helga Henry who had been a lawyer and then had become an arts manager at a senior level for arts organisation. She had grown up public speaking and she was super confident, eloquent and she spoke to us like we were already a success, just that she had some information to pass on.

Speaker 2 59:14

And I responded ridiculously well to this and very quickly wanted to share what I was learning as well, and at that time I just started keeping a blog. Blogging was a thing and I started sharing what I was learning on the blog as well and I started to become a bit of a kind of exemplar for that group. I was doing everything that was asked of me and I was learning on the blog as well, and I started to become a bit of a kind of exemplar for that group. I was doing everything that was asked of me and I was loving it. Anyway, I did so well at it that I ended up being employed by Helga Okay, when her organization changed and I went and worked as her assistant. We ended up running a company that delivered that stuff and I was fully addicted to trying this on myself, sharing it with other people empowering other artists.

Speaker 2 59:55

Again going back to that, continued learning that you, yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And I met another couple of people that worked with her who were like academics and business consultants quite high-level business consultants who'd come in to talk to us. I met what aspects of business were you learning as an artist?

Speaker 2 1:00:14

Essentially, all the course was each week was a different aspect of the business, so the first week was about building a vision of what you wanted to do, and the last week was about a planning process that was delivered to us by a brilliant consultant called Andrew Bass, which was a way of stepping back from that goal to find out how to do this. Those two things on their own were phenomenal Building a vision and a planning process, working backwards to achieve that vision.

Speaker 2 1:00:44

Yeah, and I still teach both of those things now because they were fundamentally the things that changed me In between that. There was a week on finance and bookkeeping and basics. There was a week on copyright law legals. There was a week on marketing Sounds useful, it was great, it was amazing and it was all funded by Business Link, so it's free to me and one of the things that I think stood out.

Speaker 2 1:01:07

So we were taught this process of networking and one of the asks and it was do you know someone or is there someone who you'd like to be your mentor? Would you make that ask? So I went away and because of my work at Wolverhampton Museum, I had access to talk to an artist called Eileen Cooper, who at that point was the head of the schools of the Royal Academy and she later went on to be the first female keeper of the schools of the Royal Academy. Wolverhampton had got a couple of pieces by her and I needed to do a talk about them. So I was going to have to email her anyway and I thought, okay, I'd always liked to work since I was 16. And in the email I said it'd be really great to talk to you about these. I'd also wondered whether you'd be interested in mentoring me. Not that you should. Anyway, she sent me a message back and saying this sounds brilliant. Why don't you come down to the studio in London? You can interview me about these pieces and we'll look at your work.

Speaker 1 1:02:01

Do you think you would have had that bravery to ask before this course?

Speaker 2 1:02:05

No, I've never had no. And so I went in the next week when I did this and got a result and everyone was like, oh wow, he's inspiring to everyone. And I think helga saw that and thought, oh, here's someone that likes not just get the result but really likes to share that result and go look, it's possible, this is amazing. And so I started teaching all of that stuff at the same time as applying the learning to myself as an artist, and I worked with helga six or seven years, and over that six or seven years, the vision that we'd had to make was roughly a five-year vision, roughly and my vision had been a solo exhibition in london and at that point, literally when my work was terrible, I tried to give a couple of paintings away to a tattoo shop and they didn't want them. I literally couldn't give them away. I opened my solo show in london seven years later, wow, and helga was there and what was the change?

Speaker 1 1:03:03

was it this? Viewing yourself not just as the romantic artist, as someone who's got to put plans into place, got to put systems into place, got to put systems into place.

Speaker 2 1:03:11

Yeah, I mean that's very ambitious plans.

Speaker 1 1:03:15

What I mean is that you had that end vision of a London show and, within this course, the idea was you work out the steps going back to make that happen.

Speaker 2 1:03:23

Yeah, and the steps, the basics of the steps, what I had the physical thing that I came away with because we'd done it as a demo in front of the group I got flip charts of each stage with to-do lists on, and I had these up in my shed for ages. So I was working in a shed at the time and so they were there and that thing kind of acted like a north star, you were seeing it every day.

Speaker 1 1:03:46

It's just pulling me a liminal messages going oh, there's my to-do list.

Speaker 2 1:03:50

Yeah so there was a bit of subliminal stuff and then, of course, that creates a bit of action and I started keeping a blog that was about my progress and actually, in a funny kind of way, it was my blog that ended up getting me my first opportunity.

Speaker 2 1:04:06

Really, okay so I started keeping a blog that was called, very romantically, from perfume to bird song and it was like the journey of my Really Okay, like that. I was also putting into play the thing I'd learned about networking a bit. And in the meantime my good friend Chantelle had started practicing as an artist and what happened was essentially she had a show in Bristol, so I went down celebrate that with her and I at this point I hadn't been in any shows really since I was a student and she was very organized, still is very organized it's one of the great things about her. And she was very organised still is very organised, it's one of the great things about her. And she was like oh, I'm in Bristol, I'd really like to go and see this gallery and this gallery. We got to one of the galleries and they were closed but they were hanging an exhibition. So we knocked on the door and said, oh, we're from different ends of the country. We were hoping to see the show, but, sorry, we've missed it. And we were hoping to see the show, but we're sorry, we've missed it. And they were like, oh, come in and have a look. So we got in and we were chatting to the owners and he said, oh, one of the curators is in the stock room, go and say hello. So we weren't in the stock room and there was a guy in there. I said, oh, lovely to meet you. Hi, I'm Dean, I'm Chippy. Oh, what do you do? Okay, cool, yeah, and we ended up going for a drink with them somewhere, got on quite well.

Speaker 2 1:05:30

Anyway, I went home and about maybe five months later I got an email from the guy that I'd met in the stock room saying we have got an opportunity to curate the summer show at the royal west of england academy. Turned out him and his partner had got an art blog as well that was reviewing shows. They were kind of art lovers and art world insiders in a way, and through their blog they'd been given this opportunity to curate. And anyway he said look, I've kept an eye on your work. I quite like it. Do you have anything that you could put in this show? Because we need more artists than we've got access to. Wow, we need 35 artists. It was that moment of the actor saying they can ride a horse and speak Spanish. I just went yeah, cool, and I didn't really have anything ready. I got some work ready, I invested massively.

Speaker 1 1:06:20

Did they give you any ideas? No, no, I was already working on something.

Speaker 2 1:06:24

But I was going quite slowly on it, a bit aimlessly, and he said I would like what you're doing. I was working on these big. They were oil paint on paper and it was about myth-making and storytelling. But I was taking images that I'd find elsewhere, mixing them together using a digital projector and then creating new places and landscapes and characters, fictional storytelling. So he said, yeah, carry on with those. Great. But they were works on paper and I knew I had to frame them and I didn't really not really done that before. So I took them to gail and co, which is an amazing framer in birmingham. They do stuff for, like the royal academy, but they're the most expensive people, right. So I said I think this is the time. So I just said to my dad can I borrow some money?

Speaker 1 1:07:07

you've been offered this position in a show you want yours to be the standout. Look, present them as expensive. Present them as I had to.

Speaker 2 1:07:17

Yeah, I felt like I had to, and some of the people that were in the show were already relatively big names as well, so I felt like this was. I just felt like it was the right time to step up the game, and so I invested in the framing and took the work down there, and then, essentially what happened was the night before it opened, they shared with some of their collectors a PDF this is the work that's going to be in the show and one of the collectors who couldn't be there he bought two of my pieces before it even opened.

Speaker 2 1:07:50

Before it even opened, yeah, and then I think, as a result of that, they were like well, we'll do more with him, and it was as simple as that.

Speaker 1 1:07:58

So again, that link between you're the artist, they're the commerce, the balance between the two of you.

Speaker 2 1:08:04

Yeah, and they phoned me and went we've got this guy who wants to buy two and went. We've got this guy who wants to buy two.

Speaker 1 1:08:08

What was that?

Speaker 2 1:08:08

feeling like Like I imagine like someone taking heroin for the first time. Yeah, yeah, it was unreal, it was amazing and I was suddenly dealing in more money than I mean. It was like a month and a half's wages for one painting. Well, it was more than that. It was three months' wages at the museum and I'd invested three months' wages in the premise.

Speaker 1 1:08:31

It was just mind-blowing, but did this feel now like a start, like the snowball was about to go over the crest of the hill?

Speaker 2 1:08:39

Yeah, the good and bad thing about that story is that it was like heroin and I instantly knew that I had to maintain it, I had to keep going.

Speaker 1 1:08:49

And what did that look like? So the guys that asked you to be in the show, they asked you to do more stuff.

Speaker 2 1:08:54

Well, the extra, the addition to that feeling of kind of the hit. We went down to the show and I wasn't nervous because I already sold the work. But I walked into the Royal Academy in Bristol and, having already sold, feeling a million dollars, we went from meal afterwards and the curators loved me, obviously because it sold, and it was just overwhelmingly brilliant the whole thing. And even then, if I'd have been smart, I would have spotted the danger there. But frankly, I'd been trying for so long that I didn't see any like you say now was the time you wanted to maintain.

Speaker 2 1:09:30

This is it we go now. I got back to the studio. Suddenly the work's easier because there's a point, there's a place for it to go, there's some social kind of confirmation. It all got easier, everything was easy. And what does that?

Speaker 2 1:09:45

journey look like after that initial catalyst that sent you what happened then was they weren't a gallery even at the time. They'd done a blog and then they'd done this show at the royal west of england academy as curators and then I think after that they started to think, oh, maybe we could be a kind of gallery, but they didn't have a space. They would do pop-ups, they would have relationships with other galleries or other spaces and do things so. So the first call I got after that was we're going to do the Affordable Art Fair at Hampstead in six months. Can we have some new work ready? And what was lovely about that and I think this is great, if you're an artist who can meet someone who's growing with you as a gallery, that's a lovely thing. They were growing, trying new things. I was growing, they were taking me on the journey with them. I never sold massively, but I always sold enough at the shows to keep them going. Yeah, okay, this is interesting.

Speaker 2 1:10:39

And so we did affordable art fairs for a while. Then they said I think what we'd like to do next is go up a level. So is that? What a solo show? So well, to start with we did some international art fairs art central, hong kong, art context in miami, and and it's going well. And then they were always really brave. There's a lot of risk taking. They took a booze at what was called art 14, and art 15 also happened and it was going to be like a competitor for Freeze really. It was Olympia in London and they said eventually we're going to do this, and so it was a bit of a step up and at the same time they'd had a relationship with a gallery in London and they'd narrowed it down to about six artists and they were doing a sequence of solo shows Went through that cycle twice, so I had two solo shows. Were you feeling like?

Speaker 1 1:11:31

the proverbial middle of the road artist at this point, or were in your brain, were you like? No, I'm the, I was um well, I'm sure that's the differentiation yeah, we were the middle.

Speaker 2 1:11:41

We were in the middle, but I felt like we were making really rapid progress through it. It wasn't static, yeah, yeah. And what was really weird was like I went from going I would love to get into the affordable art fair to suddenly going I'm not sure I want to do that again. Well, again, it's that I don't want to get pigeonholed.

Speaker 1 1:11:58

You've done the journey, yeah, and the things that you thought you would achieve that would blow your mind. And now I've done that. So it needs to be freeze or it needs to be bigger.

Speaker 2 1:12:08

So I had two solo shows and both went quite well. The second one, for whatever reason, didn't sell as well, but I got good reviews.

Speaker 1 1:12:17

You were living the life you were after parties at the Groucho Club.

Speaker 2 1:12:21

Yeah, and I was in London a lot and I was hanging out. We met some of the collectors and it was great. We did all sorts of interesting things and got access to places that we wouldn't normally have got in. Yeah, it was good.

Speaker 1 1:12:33

Like you, say, taste of that heroin.

Speaker 2 1:12:36

Yeah.

Speaker 1 1:12:37

You want to maintain that.

Speaker 2 1:12:38

Yeah, so I'm still back here making work, and that's okay, because there was constantly a deadline. So I'd be in the studio making work and it'd be like, oh, three to six months, we're doing this.

Speaker 1 1:12:56

You need new work. So it's like really on it and it gave everything purpose and had that idea of geography now gone out the window. Yeah, I'm working in starbridge, but I'm selling in london.

Speaker 2 1:13:00

Yeah, it doesn't all over the world yeah, and it doesn't matter, and so it meant that also, what I could do was avoid the local art scene, did you?

Speaker 1 1:13:07

feel like you were dare I say better than the.

Speaker 2 1:13:11

I have to say I always think I'm better. I've always thought in one level that I am the best artist in the world and on another level I'm better.

Speaker 1 1:13:18

But again you're on that same level. You're so self-deprecating.

Speaker 2 1:13:21

Yeah, it's one or the other, but I was really trying hard not to speak to people in that way or not to behave in that way, but to not to speak to people in that way or not to behave in that way, but I didn't have to be involved with anything locally because I was busy, right, yeah, good.

Speaker 2 1:13:35

And then it very quickly became about the next thing, and the balance was always that I was still trying to be very sincere and authentic about the work and run proper art projects, really. So for my last show we rented another space, we got actors, we built a set, I made a film, I got a filmmaker to come and make a documentary about it. The process of making the art was really big and involved, so I was trying to be very genuine about it, but at the same time it was on my mind that people needed to buy it, otherwise I wouldn't get another shot.

Speaker 1 1:14:05

Does that conflict with that? I've got to be true to the art again, that balance between commerce.

Speaker 2 1:14:10

It's very difficult, isn't it? Because, on one hand, that why and again I think this is underestimated by people the need to hit deadlines will accelerate your ability like nothing else. Yeah, in one way, having to paint and get it out and keep going I made more paintings in five years than I'd made in the previous 15 because done is better than perfect in a lot of sense because if you it has to be. There's a bloke coming with a van, there's a van coming.

Speaker 1 1:14:37

This has got to be done well and you dealt with all those things like was that a battle, though? Did you battle against that when you looked at work, because we do go into that. There is an idea that nothing's ever perfect, but when you're balancing that, did you sacrifice? Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2 1:14:54

Yeah, and there were art fairs, for example, where I got stuff ready and either it wasn't that well or it didn't go that great that I sent stuff that was below par, and I really regret that now, that idea that an album is all killer and no filler. I suppose in the end there was some filler, there was some killer for sure but there wasn't all.

Speaker 2 1:15:16

And yeah, there was stuff going out that definitely wasn't of the right quality, but it was more important to me to maintain the feeling of being wanted. That's what the real thing was. It was my gallery wanted me and then my collectors wanted the work, so there was ego.

Speaker 1 1:15:35

I am the ego.

Speaker 2 1:15:36

But no, it was more like I always felt like I worked for them. I liked working for them. They thought I was good like if, if we sold, it was we sold. I loved that. It was like I was part of a team, almost part of a family, and I was doing my bit and I was getting love back, but everyone was getting a result, yeah. So yeah, it was great, it was really good.

Speaker 1 1:16:02

So what happens then? Because when we spoke earlier, you said that success was one of the worst things that could have happened.

Speaker 2 1:16:08

really, yeah, it is definitely success, I think is probably one of the worst things that happened to me, in the sense that, personally, there's a slight as much as I tried to a slight losing sight of why you make the work in the first place. The relationship with yourself and your work and the buyers becomes this triangle. It's not just between you and the work anymore, it's this third angle to it that means that it's not as intimate anymore.

Speaker 1 1:16:36

So there's that, and then did you feel like you were creating art to a brief? Not a brief, but to no and someone else's demand?

Speaker 2 1:16:46

a little bit that well, and I was frustrating to the gallery, I think, because I would constantly change what I was doing from one show to the next. They just feel like they got a handle on how to talk about a particular set of work and I go, I know your style dean is this, dean is that.

Speaker 1 1:17:00

And then suddenly you were changing, so I was a bit changeable for that do you think that's a good thing, or about?

Speaker 2 1:17:04

yeah, it's great now. It's definitely a good thing now, because I'm not bound to any particular style now, yeah, and there was something that I read very recently.

Speaker 1 1:17:12

actually that's quite poignant. I can't remember who said it, but it was about how the artist spoke about their artistic ego doesn't dictate what the medium is. It's about communicating the message. So if you're an oil painter and suddenly go, actually I'm going to make a sculpture, because that tells the story better. It's about that visual communication.

Speaker 2 1:17:32

Yeah, I think to a certain extent you need that freedom. It's very easy to get seduced by materials.

Speaker 1 1:17:37

Does that conflict with what a gallery wants? Because they can put you in a box and go? This is Dean. He does really dark, beautiful oil paintings.

Speaker 2 1:17:45

We've got to collect through the mind for that. That's definitely the perception. That's definitely the perception and again, that is definitely the case in the middle ground. So I think, if you think about artists that are operating right at the top of the game, they can pretty much do whatever they want, it's the name, it's almost the brand.

Speaker 1 1:17:58

Like Damien Hirst, he can convey a bell, do whatever.

Speaker 2 1:18:01

And you can do that. I think if you're a well-known painter, there's a good chance. Probably you go I'm going to do a show of sculptures, people will be interested, whereas if you're operating in a in the middle ground and painting sales, that's pretty difficult for a gallery that's operating there, which is one of the reasons that people in the middle of their career, I think, get quite stuck. I only didn't get stuck, not because I was very clever or anything. It was just that I naturally had to do something. I wasn't very good at repeating myself, just couldn't do it. So I had to keep moving and keep trying things.

Speaker 1 1:18:33

So where does this all fall down? Because you don't come to the conclusion that success was probably the worst thing that could have happened for you, or perhaps you weren't prepared for it.

Speaker 2 1:18:41

What I wasn't prepared for was to lose it, and I always knew that it was a possibility that it would go away, but it was like the biggest fear really.

Speaker 1 1:18:51

What happened? So what happened was Made it feel like it was going away.

Speaker 2 1:18:55

So we had a show in 2016. It was a solo show in London and 2016 was a weird time. There was stuff going on politically. I think Brexit had just been announced. My show was in winter. I'm not sure that matters. Lots of people still came came, but some collectors didn't make it over from overseas. Anyway, it got quite good reviews. It was quite a dark show. It wasn't the easiest to sell. It didn't commercially do that great and at that point how did you feel at this?

Speaker 1 1:19:24

point, because presumably, oh, I was exhausted.

Speaker 2 1:19:26

Yeah, there'd been a chat about eight weeks before the show about whether we were going to pull it or not, because I wasn't ready and I was exhausted. Yeah, there'd been a chat about eight weeks before the show about whether we were going to pull it or not, because I wasn't ready and I was ill. I was mentally not very well and the gallery blessed them. They were so lovely about it. They were like we don't think really you should carry on and do this. You're going to make yourself unwell. But we're not going to. I was like please don't take it away from me, I've got to do so.

Speaker 2 1:19:49

I did it, pushed through it, and they then come to the end of their cycle of shows anyway and they ended up getting a different opportunity offered to them to do something slightly different and they've worked really hard with us as a group of artists. They put so much risk in and they'd always been brilliant with us. And I have to say say there's a lot of talk now of galleries that are turns out I've not been as honest as you might think. My gallery were brilliant brilliant they're called coats and scary. They're great. They always paid me, they were always honest. They kept every gentleman's agreement they ever made fantastic, but they were like we think we might do something else for a bit probably. We've come to a bit where you now need to go off and do your own thing and build a cv that isn't just with us, which makes perfect sense but what does that feel like?

Speaker 2 1:20:35

and I went I felt instantly like I'd been ejected from the airplane really yeah, and I just panicked.

Speaker 1 1:20:43

And take it personally yeah, I did yeah, I did yeah because despite them explaining that it was just a different business.

Speaker 2 1:20:50

they were lovely to me and I was really not the easiest in the end to be around because I felt like part of the team. Yeah, I felt like we were doing this together and also I knew that I was hanging on by a thread mentally to get the work done as well. So it was mixed feelings. Was this the straw? That sort of broke the camel's?

Speaker 1 1:21:10

back it was.

Speaker 2 1:21:11

It was really, and I'd not been well for a while mentally and I'd kind of made my way back from that and then I just panicked and it was almost like I knew that this was the end of that journey for me and I did everything I could to stop it being the end. What I should have done was just relaxed and gone and done some work, because of course, what is very difficult for us to imagine now is that people can't see what, everything that we're going through right, because we feel like we're so visible and I was online a lot and it felt to me like this was apparent to everyone, but of course, no one knew what was happening. If I'd have gone away and just done some work for a couple of years and made some new work, that would have been perfectly fine, but I didn't.

Speaker 1 1:21:57

But presumably there is that demand on you as a working artist. You've still got to sustain, you've still got to pay bills, you've still got to do this. All of that, yeah.

Becoming The Artist Advisor and Rebirth

Speaker 2 1:22:05

And the other thing was that by this point I'd left any job that I'd had and I was now a full-time artist. I did some day rate work as a consultant occasionally, but I was predominantly making a living as an artist, and for a couple of years that was phenomenal, like more than I could ever have dreamed of, and then that had tailed off to nothing very quickly. So, yeah, now I was financially in a hole. I'd got a practice that only worked on quite a large scale. Really, I worked only on not just large scale paintings, but everything was like big production, like pre-made canvases, made to measure canvases. They were very expensive, everything was getting framed.

Speaker 1 1:22:45

I had a system yeah, and that you'd learned presumably from the business link I'd done? Yeah, I didn't, I tried to do the whole job properly and make it so that I was doing it all properly.

Speaker 2 1:22:54

But of course, what stopped was the outlet. Suddenly, there's this blocked pipe and the pressure starts to build. But I didn't really wait for the pressure to build, I just panicked. And what's the phrase? I fell off. I fell off.

Speaker 2 1:23:11

And yeah well, it was kind of like uh, this is going to happen now anyway, and it's humiliating. I think my overwhelming feeling that I felt long before I ever needed to was shame, really. I was really ashamed that I hadn't managed to keep it up, because it felt to me like I'd I hadn't made it in some kind of massive way, but I'd done all right and like you say, you kind of in your head, you had you were looking at the affordable art fair in hampstead going I don't really want.

Speaker 2 1:23:37

Well, I was way beyond that, and we were, I think. We just had a conversation about a potential one person show in la.

Speaker 1 1:23:43

Wow, it's going to be the next possible thing so your dreams of your aspirations, your dreams, they're all there. And then suddenly the yeah, but I knew that I did I had nothing except the work.

Speaker 2 1:23:55

No, I had no relationships with any buyers or collectors myself. All of the people that bought my work, really I'm sure they liked the work, but really they were supporting the gallery, they were supporting the gallerists, they had good relationships with them and so they were theirs. And now I'm just a guy who doesn't really know anyone, certainly not people that buy art for the kind of money that I was selling at. And then in the meantime I developed a chronic illness through overthinking and stress and I'd got psoriatic arthritis which was starting to catch up with me. The medication was starting to catch up with me. Did that mean you physically couldn't paint? I could, but it was getting harder and harder to put that many hours in. I was no, not painful, I was just tired a lot. So I was dealing with what essentially was like having chronic fatigue syndrome. So I knew that I was going to have to change my work.

Speaker 2 1:24:50

And yeah, and then what I entered, I guess, was this like what I've later read in as I read more about psychology and particularly young and stuff. So I entered these kind of the swamp lands, this drudge, right, I entered this, this difficult forest. It's like it's like that, the dante's inferno thing. I was 37 and I didn't know where to go or what to do, so things went wrong for a long time. I made bits of work that didn't work. I tried to change things that didn't work, tried to be more commercial and just do selling art for much cheaper. That didn't work, didn't like, that, couldn't do it Tried to take all the money out of my practice and just do very conceptual things for myself.

Speaker 1 1:25:38

I worked again was that the two polar extremes. There wasn't the balance again.

Speaker 2 1:25:42

No balance, no, it's like I was swinging like this yeah, crazy pendulum which people do when this might work.

Speaker 2 1:25:48

No, this might work yeah, this I was just going from one to the other and nothing working, and I could feel that feeling coming back of not being able to paint Really. So the work was starting to get worse again, paralyzed, paralyzed and overthinking, and the predominant feeling was and this is the work, I suppose, that I continue to have to do, and this is very personal to me is that for me, it's very difficult to see a point to making work that doesn't have a place to go. Okay, it needs to have an end point. There needs to be an audience, this idea of audience.

Speaker 2 1:26:24

Some people are great. They make their work for themselves. They make their work because they are involved in a journey that's internal, and then they happen to make a product and then that happens to find an audience, and that is a beautiful and probably idyllic way to make art. That is the preferable way to make art. Yeah, what I have to face is whatever, for whatever reason, an end point, an exhibition, a deadline gives purpose to the thing is that a result of all the learning going?

Speaker 1 1:26:54

oh, I need the goal, need to work back to the system yeah, yeah, and again time Rather than the goal actually being oh, I just want to express myself.

Speaker 2 1:27:01

So we talk about the pendulum thing, of course, not just in the work, as that happened, but in the theory, in the idea of so all of these techniques work to create success, which for a while, was the thing that I've thought of as the enemy now, for a while was the thing that I've thought of as the enemy now. So now, goal setting, strategy, all evil, horrible they're affecting my creativity, my presence.

Speaker 1 1:27:24

I'd be free to create, but I couldn't shake them.

Speaker 2 1:27:27

I agree yeah, so there's this notion isn't there. That being strategic is in any way is bad, particularly as an artist. Yeah, you must be authentic and it's about the work and of course, and that's great, and I swung right back to there, except my brain actually needs a bit of strategy and planning otherwise, like we've discussed, I think it's if artists thought of themselves in a slightly more entrepreneurial way.

Speaker 1 1:27:53

Hence john from cosimo yes which we will get on to later down the line, who is obviously the person who suggested you for the creative noah land podcast.

Speaker 2 1:28:01

Yeah, it is a balance yeah, it is a balance and and this is where individuals and individuals relationship with this stuff needs time to be explored and to be seen, and this is why, one size fits all art courses to improve your practice don't work. Yeah, because there's quite complicated psychology going on and I'm certainly not any kind of pseudo psychologist. But having real conversations with people about their motivations and what's really going on is very useful. Sometimes I'm comfortable, but that's not going to happen in a. Do you want to make 16 grand a year, kind of did anyone have those?

Speaker 1 1:28:39

while you were going through all this, did anyone have those conversations with you? Did you have any mentors again that were so well?

Speaker 2 1:28:45

I had some therapists, yeah, so they were suggesting some thoughts and, yeah, the people that had been around. The other thing that also happened was that while things were going well, I was much more popular than when they weren't. This is also a true fact and it's I've said to people. It's much easier to be successful than it is to struggle. That's why, really, I should have been more comfortable in the notion that not everyone could see that I felt it was going wrong, because it wasn't really a very natural process and other opportunities probably would have come.

Speaker 1 1:29:19

Do you think if you hadn't panicked and had just gone? I'm not creative at the moment but I can still use all the skills I've learned of networking I'll go to that show. I'll meet that person. You went down to Bristol on a whim to see your friend and ended up in a gallery.

Speaker 2 1:29:32

Yeah, that's a very good point. Going backwards was very hard for my ego. It wasn't easy to do that. Yeah, I was just embarrassed.

Speaker 1 1:29:40

Well, look, you said the Hampstead Affordable Art Fair was some people would dream of doing it.

Speaker 2 1:29:45

Yeah, and I did too, and you did, and I remember at one point saying to myself when we just stopped doing affordable art fairs, I remember thinking, you know what if this experiment doesn't go well and I end up back doing affordable art fairs as a career? That'll be brilliant, I love, that'll be perfect. Of course, I didn't feel that later on I'd got ideas back to that tape of that. I grew up with ideas above my station again or were they above my station? Who knows it's like? Is there a station Maybe? So I was back to this dialogue again of who do you think you are? Look what you've said. You did, and now you couldn't maintain it.

Speaker 2 1:30:23

Look what you had in your hands and you lost.

Speaker 1 1:30:26

You gave yourself the irrefutable evidence that you could do it, but then, when it was taken away, you didn't really think you could do it again.

Speaker 2 1:30:33

And there's a thing isn't there about Alan de Botton talks about this beautifully the you didn't really think you could do it again. And there's a thing isn't there about Alan de Botton talks about this beautifully the idea of if we believe that anything is possible for us, what we also take on?

Speaker 1 1:30:45

is that anything that we don't achieve is our fault? Yeah, what a great channel that is the School of Life and Alan.

Speaker 2 1:30:50

Yeah, it was really important to me back then that notion of status anxiety as well that his book talks about very well. I think he's great and that status anxiety, the book helped me quite a bit.

Speaker 1 1:31:02

Can you talk a little bit more about that, because I reckon there's people listening to this that will go status anxiety. So that sounds like what I've got status anxiety.

Speaker 2 1:31:09

I first heard the phrase when I read a book by alan de botten who talks about essentially the lengths that we will go to to appear to be keeping up with the Joneses.

Speaker 2 1:31:20

So that's like a. So sometimes it's status in terms of money talks a lot about executives clinging on to, to the status that the people getting promotions, and then you come home and you realize you don't really know what you're doing. And I recognised that for me, that anxiety around my status was very big, a very big issue for me to deal with. And so the journey has been. That was like nine years ago and over the last nine years the process has been walking through that swampland learning about myself, rebuilding, getting ready for a next phase, understanding what was great about what happened and what wasn't so great, understanding what I want for the future, and also understanding that I'm one of those people that when I'm in pain, I feel like I'm going to be stuck like that forever. I panic quite a lot. I don't have a sense of time passing, so I'm not calm because I don't think about this passing but in that nine years is this where we start to develop the artist advisor yeah.

Speaker 2 1:32:20

So during that time, we all went through lockdown, didn't we? And? And all of a sudden, everyone was struggling with work and shows, which was great.

Speaker 1 1:32:28

What I'm asking is in the sense that, like you battle with this idea again of regression and not being the artist, say that perhaps you thought you were or could be yeah, so again, in some ways a little bit of a regression, but that love of what you enjoy doing, of giving back to people yeah, give back all the information that you've learned. Where did you feel like that developed from? Or was that some sort of coping mechanism for you not creating so much art and being in this sort of nine year recovery in?

Speaker 2 1:33:00

some respects, I think it's recovery. Yeah, there's lots of conversations about the notion of the wounded healer, but my understanding is that many people that are in the kind of trade of healing in one way or another, counseling psychotherapists there's often a motivation that is about them, that they themselves carry a wound. So I think there was a sense of that. Also on a practical level, at this point I was running out of money and I thought what else can I do? What do I do? What am I?

Speaker 1 1:33:30

good for. Was it really that extreme? What am I good for? Not? How do I make money in my art?

Speaker 2 1:33:35

I always tried to use that. No, at this point I've decided that attempting to make any money from my art was a really bad idea, and I didn't know whether that would be permanently Maybe. Seven years ago I was like I need to detach money from my art Maybe forever, but certainly for now to try and build a relationship with it again. I was still occasionally doing day rate consultancy work and still enjoyed that. But what I hated more and more was being in front of groups, standing at the front of a room with a group of people which predominantly all my work had been, and I was always very nervous, I was always terrified and the biggest thing I did I was a host for the first TEDx Brum with Helga. We were just hosts, but it was a host for the first tedx brum with helga we were just hosts, but it was a crowd. And then we were live streaming to columbia.

Speaker 2 1:34:22

Well, it was massive and it was terrifying, but you did it, I did it. Then I realized that actually group work standing in front of a class or a group was very stressful. And then lockdown happened and a couple of people had asked me for advice. We look at my practice. I did a few of these kind of for free and I thought, oh, I wonder if maybe I'm gonna start charging people for that. I don't really like the idea of charging it, but frankly, I can't keep doing this.

Speaker 1 1:34:51

No, it goes back to what you said.

Speaker 2 1:34:52

You don't mind that relationship money's a bit of a straight money's difficult and I don't like taking money from artists, especially because they're often pretty vulnerable and money is often difficult for them. But people started saying, oh, you really helped and it's really given me value. And so then lockdown happened and everyone started using Zoom. Everyone got really comfortable with Zoom and online meetings and I thought, oh, I don't even have to leave my house for this. This could be really great.

Speaker 1 1:35:18

Did that find a bit of purpose again for you?

Speaker 2 1:35:21

A little bit yeah.

Speaker 1 1:35:23

And also that giving back to others that non-selfless act in a sense. Actually, it makes me feel good that I'm helping others.

Speaker 2 1:35:30

I think it made me feel better, that it made them to start with.

Speaker 1 1:35:33

That's not a bad thing, though, dude.

Speaker 2 1:35:34

No, I think it's okay. I was still giving value, but I do recognize it. And also, I think what really helped my self-esteem the most was that, firstly, there's the thing of being wanted again. I started to see that I was a little bit wanted and that was lovely. But also there was a feeling of independence again. I was suddenly in control. If I worked really hard at the business, I could scale it up or I could keep it quite small, but either way I was now in control of my own destiny.

Speaker 1 1:36:05

And when you've been spiralling potentially mentally.

Speaker 2 1:36:07

Even before that, I'd either had a job where you're not in control of your own destiny you can be very redundant or I was working with a gallery that held all the cards in terms of collectors. I had no power there really. Suddenly it was like okay, this is much smaller scale, but it's mine. Yeah, I can decide, and I had lots of help to build it up. I have to say it wasn't a natural thing for me and had some difficulties in running it, but what do you feel like you had to change about yourself.

Speaker 1 1:36:36

That would make it easier for you I am.

Speaker 2 1:36:39

I'm not very organized and that again recently been diagnosed with adhd. I now realize what some of the stuff I was up against, but also there was some very clear kind of business strategies that I needed to do that I couldn't figure out how to do, even from the crossover, all the stuff you did with business I did.

Speaker 1 1:36:56

all that you couldn't see out how to do, even from the crossover all the stuff you did with business you couldn't see the.

Speaker 2 1:36:58

There's a lovely phrase that, funnily enough, helga left me with In a lot of senses.

Speaker 1 1:37:03

You can't tickle yourself, is her phrase, so even you know what you should be doing sometimes you need, oh, that idea of, oh, I know the advice, but me taking that advice it's really difficult to process sometimes. You can't see. I see that, yeah, because a lot of times I can give great you give great advice to everyone else and then suddenly someone comes which is again part of the thing, to deal with imposter syndrome isn't it, but I quickly understood that actually there isn't a direct correlation between the result and the information I'm.

Speaker 2 1:37:33

I am on the journey as well and it's fine and, like I'm some bits, I'm really good at times, some bits I need help.

Speaker 2 1:37:39

It goes back to the thing the best way to learn is to teach, and you're yeah, absolutely, and I know people that have other skills, and one of the things that I guess is part of what I talk about is, in a world where artists have to do everything for themselves, be everything, the idea of delegation or asking someone else to do something seems impossible now, or even just asking for some help. Yeah, asking for help is a huge one. It's not seen as a very noble thing to do, in a way it seemed. But one thing I suppose to my credit, I think is I'm quite good at asking for help at times.

Speaker 1 1:38:12

I have been quite good at making the ask at certain times, so did you have to get people in to help you with a little bit of those organisational skills? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 1:38:21

Well, I worked with my friend who's really great at setting up businesses, and then I worked very briefly with a virtual assistant to help me set up some systems to manage things like bookings and calendars Great. I worked very briefly with a financial advisor to help me set up some bookkeeping stuff.

Speaker 1 1:38:39

All of that stuff I went elsewhere for do you think that's important for people that don't feel like they're good at an element, to go and find someone to help them? Like they say, that delegation thing it's a bit of an alien thing to do, to ask for help, but actually you could save yourself a world of trouble time.

Speaker 2 1:38:57

Another phrase. There's lots of phrases that come from my old boss, helga, but one of them there's an idea that you should do what only you can do in a business, and, of course, what most people say is I can't afford to pay someone because I'm not earning any money. And I get that, and I get that. There's a kind of a circle to be squared or whatever I feel, especially doing the podcast.

Speaker 1 1:39:17

I feel like I'm chief everything officer of all of my business Matt Wilson photography, creative Noah Land, matt Wilson artists. I'm trying to do it all, yes.

Speaker 2 1:39:28

And, like you said, sometimes that spreads too thin. There's going to be a time when there's a leap to be made where you go. Actually, I need a person to do that now. I need someone to organize the guests and I'm going to tell you immediately you won't be able to afford it. But that's where progress you have to go backwards to go forwards.

Speaker 1 1:39:44

It's that investment in oneself, isn't it? And I think, to a certain level with season two, I am investing myself and the podcast yes but, like you say, later down the line there might be a leap where I go. Someone's going to have to do the editing's, gonna have to organize the guests for me. Someone's gonna have to produce the social media stuff for me because I'm yeah and yeah, because there's gonna be a thing that only you can do it doesn't matter how many people you employ, there'll be a thing that requires you and that will be

Speaker 1 1:40:12

what you will be doing and I know that because I am at that point where I edit everything. I listen to these conversations over and over again and I probably could just hand the audio over to someone, but again that sort of goes back to control.

Speaker 2 1:40:24

Yeah, and that's because that, for you, I would guess that's the art. In a sense, that's where it is, that's the nub of it, and I think artists do spread themselves very thinly and I often wonder why more artists don't say, for example, group together and get a bookkeeper, or and it seems to me that often there are underdeveloped opportunities you only need someone to give you a hand for a bit, to give you that leeway, and sometimes people need an opportunity back in as well and sometimes young people like students, whatever exactly, and sometimes, like you say, sometimes you need someone just to potentially show you a system.

Speaker 1 1:41:00

Yeah, that could speed up your workflow. Do anything you go. Wow, I didn't realize I could do it like one hour with this virtual assistant.

Speaker 2 1:41:07

We had a meeting on productivity where she talked to me about systems. So there's so much stuff anyway. So there's that. So there's lots of things I I had to put into place. And then, of course, what happened as a result of running that business in inverted commas properly to a certain extent, was that other people started to notice that I was doing this and other opportunities happened, and they happen in quite an organic way. So I was working with someone whose son was a student at Falmouth University. She told her son about me. Her son told the tutor. They called me and said oh, will you run a professional practice class for Falmouth Uni for this course?

Speaker 2 1:41:43

I did that for four years. As a result of doing that, someone saw LinkedIn that I was doing that a bit of third-party endorsement.

Speaker 2 1:41:51

And then I met John through LinkedIn, who runs and we'll talk about John from Cosimo, who has lots of the skills that I don't have, and we worked together on some educational stuff and then, and so things grow and then, as that got better, my relationship with my work starts to improve because there's less pressure on it and I start to feel like I'm re-emerging, but not repeating what I did before. I'm not the same person anymore and I'm very clear on this idea. So at the moment, and probably by this time the podcast goes out, I'm guessing it'll be over, but just doing a studio sales show of work that I made seven, eight, nine years ago, just because I wanted it to have one last airing, and then it's done.

Speaker 1 1:42:37

It's like some kind of closure for me, and it's then the next move, obviously carrying on with your art advisory roles and things like that yeah, then are you looking to start creating again yourself?

Speaker 2 1:42:48

so I do create myself, I just haven't been sharing it as much. I've set myself the challenge of moving into a slightly different area. I don't know that I want to, as an artist, enter the fray of competing with other visual artists that are doing big paintings and the gallery world and all that. I find it draws me back a little bit like an addict who needs to steer clear of certain things.

Speaker 1 1:43:13

I think probably that's not great for me but is that because the balance for you has always been about the art rather than the commerce and the fact that you don't want to drag your art into that world? Because you've almost covered that commerce side and your income and your bills with?

Speaker 2 1:43:27

being the art advisor.

Speaker 1 1:43:28

That is covered, so it frees you up to be the artist that you want to be.

Speaker 2 1:43:34

There's also a sense that I'm now.

Speaker 2 1:43:37

I was nearly 40 when I ended that journey, if you like, and now I'm nearly 50 and I'm very open to progressing as a human being as well and trying desperately hard not to cling to things. It seems to me that clinging to previous identities for the sake of it often causes kind of problems in people's lives. So I'm trying to be very open to intuiting for myself what is right for me next, and what I'm intuiting a lot is that if I look at the art world and the way that my work interacted with it before forgetting all of the ego stuff and the financial stuff for a second the way that I got to communicate with people was never quite satisfactory to me, in the sense that through painting I was never really able to create the feeling in people in the gallery space that I would want. It's not quite the right kind of communication. The only kind of painting that does that gets close to that for me are really old paintings in really old rooms seem to create this feeling that I was after.

Speaker 1 1:44:50

So the world of A bit like drug-taking context and setting yeah, context and setting Absolutely yeah, it can be great.

Speaker 2 1:44:57

Yes, so the whole contemporary art world. If I think about now, my last solo show and that PV and it was busy and full and people drinking wine and looking at the work and wanting me to chat to me about things it was all great, it was lovely, but I don't think they're having the experience of the work. I don't think they're having the experience of the work. I don't think the work is doing the thing that I would hope it's doing. What seems to me is that there's lots of contemporary art environments where it seems to be entertainment and this might be a controversial thing to say and might make some people cross with this but the entertainment industry and the art world seems to have blurred a little bit. You know what? I very rarely got asked what my work was about. It's one of the giveaways. Very rarely I could do a whole show and maybe have two conversations about what the work was about.

Speaker 1 1:45:44

Is that something to do with the perceived idea of? Oh, I should know what this art is about.

Speaker 2 1:45:49

So I don't have to ask the artist. It was a bit scary. Oh, I get it. I get it. There was a bit of fear, I think. Did you get the joke? Almost? Yeah, again, there's another sense that the contemporary art world is also through it now, I hope. But for a long time there was no place for earnestness or sincerity. Everything was sarcastic and the joke and the gag, and so it did scare audiences, I think, and I'm not interested in particularly jokes and gags that much. There are things I like riddles and I like secrets and I like there are little games in my work, but I'm not really interested in pulling the wool over people's eyes or being smug about laughing at them, you know.

Speaker 1 1:46:28

And you sometimes used to see those things at things like the Affordable Art Fair, where you'd have a huge scale canvas dot painting a bit like a Damien Hirst and one of the dots will be missing and it will simply be called dot missing yeah wow, it looks like a damien hirsch. It sounds like a damien hirsch, it smells like a damien hirsch, but it's not a damien hirsch and hasn't got a damien hirsch price tag, yeah I had a lovely conversation with one of my lecturers when I was at uni once, beautiful man.

Speaker 2 1:46:53

He used to come from london just to teach us art history and occasionally he'd have a chat to us about our work and he said to me a lovely thing that really helped me. Actually. We were talking about abstraction and figuration and isms and he said perhaps don't think about art in terms of those things. Maybe think about them in terms of as either work for the head, work for the body or work for the heart. That or work for the heart, that's nice. And it would seem to me that the post-modern thing became very much work for the head, very much work for the intellect and some work for the body. It's very fashionable and it's becoming more fashionable again. But heart art, that was easy in a way. And so for me next, artistically, at the moment I'm making large drawings that are very complex in small detail, which is new for me, and I'm interested, I think, in trying to recreate that feeling of being in some great 80s films.

Speaker 2 1:47:51

If you think about films like Gremlins and Is it Never Ending Story? In both of those there's this place that the kid goes In Gremlins it's a little shop. It's like magic, right. And in Never Ending Story it's the bit where he hides in the attic of the school, puts the thing over, lights, candles and reads the book. That's the atmosphere that I love. I'm recreating that little bit of a kind of discovery of magic and I think probably the answer to that for me is a more one-to-one relationship with a viewer, where they're literally sitting in the quiet. The last thing place really that they should be at a party in a sense yeah, because it's. It breaks all the tension. I want people to be opening an old book and, wow, well, I don't know what this is.

Speaker 2 1:48:36

She's mysterious and magical and bit scary maybe yeah so, yeah, that's artistically for me, and then, in a professional sense, the artist advisor will carry on. It's changing slightly in response to this again, this proliferation of, uh, quite surface level. Improve your art courses and mentors, because I don't want to compete with that.

Speaker 1 1:49:00

You don't want to be the snake oil salesman.

Speaker 2 1:49:03

I'd rather not. What I will say about snake oil is partly what we're talking about with snake oil is belief. It's about what's that thing called where you take a tablet and it's nothing Placebo, the placebo effect. So what I will say about it, I couldn't say that nothing about what I do is snake oil, because there's a certain element of confidence that people get from a conversation with me. That is not really about the information. They go away feeling ready to work and feeling good. It's not snake oil, but it is inspiration. It's not. Yeah, it's not. There's nothing you can grasp right Now. Some people purely trade on that confidence trick and I'm not into that at all. But I do think that helping people have some self-belief is important as well as giving them practical tools.

Speaker 1 1:49:52

Would you consider it I don't know whether this is even the right word but a slightly more holistic advice to art advice and art guidance.

Speaker 2 1:50:00

Yeah, and the move I think will be towards. I guess it's about defining the right audience, and some of my clients come to me and what they really need is how to sell a bunch more art, and I'll tell them that I'm not the person for them. Or some of them come to me thinking that they want what I've got to sell and it turns out they probably don't. And we figure that out fairly quickly and it's all fine. I'm never offended by that. That's all good if I'm not right for people. But I think there's going to be a slight shift back to ironically, I think, all the way back to the creative process. So I want to talk less about careers and more about work, because if there's one trend, I suppose, that I see that bothers me is that people spend more time worrying about social media than they do make it work people who listen to this podcast regularly will probably be very bored of this quote.

Speaker 1 1:50:56

But the magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding there you go.

Speaker 2 1:51:00

Yeah, yeah, and that's a lovely quote. So I want people to work harder on their art.

Speaker 1 1:51:06

I want people to feel less entitled to success quickly and see that potentially the byproduct of working more on your art will be those knock on a fence of being. I understand it more. I can talk about it more when I'm in a network environment. I understand myself, my art, where I am.

Speaker 2 1:51:24

And also to be more self-aware, to have a better sense of orienting themselves in their life, philosophically even, which again is a big, potentially earnest aspiration.

Speaker 1 1:51:36

Do you think you aspirations more aware now?

Speaker 2 1:51:37

dean yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And there's a certain element of just getting older, right, and I've I've been a dad my daughter's 18, so I had to go through all of the humility that can bring when you get that wrong. But yeah, I'm definitely more self-aware and a little bit softer in some ways, a little bit more opinionated in others, and what I've noticed is that the biggest result of that is that I'm much more comfortable with being wrong or having difficult conversations. I feel like that's a sign that my ego is quite in check. So I can absolutely disagree with someone and still talk about it and go away not being offended and hopefully not giving any offense, and do you?

Speaker 2 1:52:24

think that's a skill set that a lot of your clients need to learn, I think so, because what I've noticed and again, I'm not a psychologist or a counselor and I wouldn't pretend to be for a minute, I don't try not to go near that stuff if I can but it is observable to me that people are trying to make very sophisticated work when sometimes their thought processes around in general as a human being aren't very sophisticated. And so it would seem to me that you're trying to do something very difficult. And again, it's this balance, isn't it, between constantly self-questioning and going is there a place that I could improve that or develop that, and then backing yourself at a certain point this is thinking versus doing.

Speaker 1 1:53:10

Just yeah, I've got this and generally.

Speaker 2 1:53:12

What I would say with my clients is they come to me in one state or the other. They're either too confident and entitled and need some kind of reality check, or they're too far the other way and need some confidence yeah, generally balance is key to all of this?

Speaker 2 1:53:30

yeah, a balance and an understanding that this is in flux all the time, constantly evolving and to try. Yeah, the balance comes in this. Not If you say to someone you could do with being a bit less cocky. Their response is often to go all the way to the other end of the scale. Or if you say to someone you need to be more confident, they'll say things like do you want me to be like an American?

Speaker 1 1:53:54

Yeah, no, just maybe just Take on some of those traits, just rein it in a bit. There's a scale.

Speaker 2 1:54:02

There's a balance? Yeah, absolutely, and I think really all I do as an art advisor is I get to look at someone's practice from the outside. I can generally see where there's an imbalance.

Speaker 1 1:54:15

And that, I guess, with an every individual artist's identity and you being able to potentially find the difference to make them a better artist. Yeah, communicator.

Speaker 2 1:54:25

Yes, and sometimes that is what I call mr miyagi type advice. Yeah, brilliant, but do you just need to do this and then, I don't know why I need I don't ask questions, just do that. Yeah, sometimes it's that, and sometimes they're quite deep conversations, you know. Sometimes they're like I don't know why I need to, don't ask questions, just do that. Yeah, sometimes it's that, and sometimes they're quite deep conversations, you know, sometimes they're well.

Speaker 1 1:54:40

Anything to do with identity is tough and addressing those because, like you say, a lot of people won't ever look at themselves yeah, I have to say that sometimes for clients what I do is a bit too deep.

Speaker 2 1:54:51

Yeah, and that's okay. So that's the self-selecting thing. I want people who are interested in seeing it holistically, seeing art making and life building as a sort of similar thing, and that one very much can inform the other and that they're open to, I suppose, philosophical growth as much as anything.

Speaker 1 1:55:11

Okay, I think I've got one sort of semi-last question, yeah, and it goes back to identity. How do you identify? Are you an artist or are you an art advisor, or do you identify as neither of those? It's a really good question.

Speaker 2 1:55:28

I think that I'm an artist. If there was only an option to do one thing, then I'd make my work. If there was only an option to do one thing, then I'd make my work. However, being an art advisor or in some way an educator or a facilitator of change or something like that, means that for me. What it does for me is that it means I have to engage with other people, so there's a social aspect. It prevents me from sinking so deep into a world that I lose myself. It pulls me back into reality and I'm in the world again, and that is very healthy for me.

Speaker 1 1:56:05

Is that because you still suffer from some of those demons?

Speaker 2 1:56:07

Yeah, I'd say so. I'd say so. I'm still keeping an eye on things.

Speaker 1 1:56:12

They do say that, don't they? By helping others.

Speaker 2 1:56:14

Actually, it helps us get past a lot of our own needs Of course, and I learned it sounds like a cliche, but absolutely true I can sometimes do a session with a client where it's entirely about them and their work and I come away having learned a tremendous amount Self-reflective. Yeah, it's really interesting and sometimes clients almost directly teach you things. It's a wonderful back and forth and the best clients, I have to say, are ones where the relationship gets stretched and it becomes a bit longer. So I've got one client, particularly that I'm thinking of a wonderful artist called Caroline Pick, who I'm sure she won't mind me talking about. She's been working with me now for three or four years and what she recognized quite early on, I think, was that the journey for it to be real was going to be slow. It's not like we do two weeks and off you go. You're not the quick fix guy are you.

Speaker 2 1:57:06

I'll get you to 10 grand in two weeks, yeah if you want to do it properly, then it takes a long time and she's been great and we've seen a massive change, not just in the work but in terms of what she believes she's capable of or possibly possible levels, and it's not false confidence either. It's not like you can do this. It's like it's come out of. We've done this step by step.

Speaker 1 1:57:33

We've proved you again the only way to combat imposter syndrome.

Speaker 2 1:57:36

Give yourself irrefutable evidence that you can do the shit you say you're going to do, and she's taking the steps and and now she's doing something crazy with 3d printers and rolls royce and it's like it's off the chart, right, and you see that progress and you go yeah, that's an exemplar of this, of what this is. It's longer and I haven't given her any secrets and we still speak every month. She needs that just to keep her on track and, like you say, some people react differently.

Speaker 1 1:58:03

They might not need the five top tips from the art advisor, they just might need that one conversation to go. You fucking got this. Let's go yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 1:58:12

One of the things that I love is that the art world isn't really a world at all. It's a bunch of ecosystems that exist, and the first thing people need to do is be able to orientate themselves in them, figure out where they are in the map and then figure out where everything else is, and then figure out what the terrain's like, but then they need someone with your wealth of experience and knowledge.

Speaker 1 1:58:33

Who's been there, done it, got the t-shirt? Yeah, I think that, mate. I think, as I say, we've done all the top tips at the head of the episode, haven't we? So we have got a closing tradition on the creative noah land podcast. We like to get some sort of quote from our guests that resonates or inspiring to you or sits with you, but also someone in your world or your network that you think could be a potential great guest to come and inspire the creative noah land audience, absolutely in any order you like. Mate, what are you thinking?

Speaker 2 1:59:03

so there's a quote and it's a funny one really. It's not immediately obvious, but it's been really important to me over the years and it comes from. There are two versions of it from different sources, and one comes from Alan Moore in his first edition of Swamp Thing, amazingly, which is utterly fantastic. And there's a very small quote that at the start of the book Swamp Thing says there are lights everywhere. There's no room for monsters in this world anymore. It's a lovely quote. And then there's another quote that speaks to this, which is by carl over nars guard.

Identity, Self-Awareness and Moving Forward

Speaker 2 1:59:40

In a book called a time for everything, he uses the phrase it's not darkness that's to be feared, it's light where the dangers lie. What do they mean to you? So what that means to me? Well, the two things.

Speaker 2 1:59:56

Firstly, it seems to me, in my artwork I'm interested in the dark, the areas that we can't see, things that are hidden from us, and I'm interested in the fact that, despite the fact that we know ever more information, we get ever more unwise. So the relationship between knowledge and wisdom seems to me to be somehow fractured and lost. And it also means you know, this notion isn't that progression is always good and, of course, on a species sense. I think this is true. So it's much better that we've got penicillin now than we did before. It's much better that you can get put to sleep to have your wisdom tooth removed we did before. It's much better that you can get put to sleep to have your wisdom tooth removed. I get all that, but at the same time, knowledge is seen in some way to be giving us all of the answers and we're getting sadder the more we know. And I wonder if, when there was more mystery in the world, when there was more speculation at times when we didn't know everyone's noobs, when we couldn't take on global problems, when we had to deal with the edges of our village and beyond that mysterious, when there were monsters, somehow, as we are more equipped to deal with things on that scale than we are.

Speaker 2 2:01:12

I remember looking at a news thing that said scientists discover black holes, can emit matter as well as absorb it, and I thought what am I going to do with that? What that creates for me is more question, less certainty. It's too big for me in a way. It's great that human race knows this, but it's not necessarily great that I have to deal with this. So I'm interested in the idea that our inner selves and the secrets and the darkness, and that there's a richness in there that we spotlight of information takes, which is why I think there's probably at the moment there's a real trend for prehistory, for folklore mythology. I think that the whole human race is feeling this problem At the moment. There's a real trend for prehistory, for folklore mythology. I think that the whole human race is feeling this problem and, lastly, it means that I guess the side to this is it's often the thing that you're not looking at. That's the problem.

Speaker 1 2:02:09

Right, it's Jungian shadow work. Yeah, exactly, the shadow self idea is prevalent to this thing and going exactly what I said most people won't look internally at themselves yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 2:02:20

Well, there's a lovely quote from young as well, isn't? It says something like people will go to incredible lengths to avoid dealing with themselves.

Speaker 2 2:02:27

No, definitely dealing with their own psyche, I think, but to me that is it's often the thing that is opposite to the thing you think is the problem. Yeah, so I love that. I love that constant kind of contrariness of that quote. And in terms of people, oh, there's so many amazing people that I could suggest to you.

Speaker 2 2:02:49

I would suggest there's a creative who's a really great friend of mine called Chantal Powell. She has run an incredible residency program for artists down in Devon, a place called Hogchester. She runs a Jungian book club called the Red Book Club, which has got God knows how many hundreds of people have joined it. It's a free thing online. She's an artist and she is doing incredible things as an artist as well. I think one of the best things about her is that she's an artist and she is doing incredible things as an artist as well. I think one of the best things about her is that she's an academic. She's a researcher as well, interested very much in alchemy and jungian psychology. So she works as an artist and she works as an educator as well wow and I'd recommend her.

Speaker 2 2:03:32

I think she would be. She's done some really great things in the arts for artists and she's fascinating.

Speaker 1 2:03:39

Sounds great. I think we've tackled a lot there, dude, and I think the audience of the Creative No-Lan podcast, especially those first few opening bits to explain your top tips of being the art advisor and also the creative journey that potentially you've been on, to give you the social proof you need to be said art advisor.

Speaker 2 2:03:59

Yes, I really appreciate that and it is a funny thing to talk about yourself for so long. And I guess, if I can just tell you one last quote again, my old boss, helga, told me it's that we used to joke a lot about needing to be special and different. I have this need to be special and different and she said we're all as special as everyone else.

Speaker 1 2:04:19

Essentially, we're all special, we're all not special in some way or other, and if everyone's special, then no one's special and it feels odd talking about myself, I think. We appreciate it, and there's lots of great stuff that I think people, artists, creatives and anyone looking to just do their thing can take away from it. Dean, thank you very much once again for doing the.

Speaker 2 2:04:40

Creative no Will Am podcast. Thank you so much for having me.

Closing Thoughts and Wisdom

Speaker 1 2:04:42

I really appreciate it. Thanks for listening to the Creative no Will Am podcast. If you found anything in this episode useful or inspiring, please consider subscribing or sharing it with a friend. You can also help the podcast by clicking the support the show link in the show notes or by grabbing yourself something from the Creative Noelle Land shop. And here's the bonus when you join the community through our website, you'll get a special discount code that gives you free shipping on all orders. So before you buy anything, be sure to join the community. Community, every bit of support helps us keep sharing these inspiring stories. So thanks again for listening and until next time. Explore, inspire and create better. To have a short life that is full of what you like doing. In a long life you spend in a miserable way.

Speaker 2 2:05:37

And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question. What do I desire?