I love how soft you feel

This week marks a year since I moved back to London.

Before that, I spent five months circling the idea of home: wondering where to place the studio, whether this was all real, or whether I was just another wandering artist trying to will something into existence.

A year later, I find myself in a kind of coherence.

Not with answers, but observation.

The systems we build: cities, platforms, institutions

Are simply a mirror of nature.

Flora, fauna, soft bodies, hard skins.

Similarly, the judgments we place on one another stem from the same voice we use to judge ourselves.

That internal critic that believes we are somehow separate from the world outside.

We think we’re all so different.

But we’re not.

In this modern age, aesthetic control has become one of the most powerful tools of influence.

Culture has always been used as soft power.

National movements are funded not just with weapons, but with beauty.

And within beauty we see softness.

But.

Softness is survival.

Softness is seduction.

Softness is strategy.

With music, fashion, art.

What we wear and what we share has always been laden with meaning.

When I look at a flower, its bloom, its timing, its color.

I don’t see weakness.

I see a system built to survive.

Designed to seduce.

Built to feed something else while protecting its seed. And that’s what this 13-week season is about.

Soft Power, Sharp Edges: Psychological Operations in the Age of Aesthetic Control

Over the next 13 newsletters, we’ll look at softness as a system. Beauty as bait. Design as manipulation. Art as survival. And the emotional, creative, and psychological weight that comes with living through aesthetics.

This week includes:

• Masks

• Bait

• Armour

• Transformation

• Repetition

• Strategy

• Reality

• Poets Corner

If you’re interested in how I work, I suggest looking at the later sections about process and repeated practice. If you want theory, the metaphors are in the middle. And if you want something personal, I’ve written about softness up front.

By the end of this season, I hope you’ll have a clearer sense of what I mean by soft power.

What I’ve seen from the edges, strategic military operations, artistic movements, and a slightly offbeat life, in a city that feels like a masterpiece and a cage.

I love you loads.

Thanks for being here.

Russ

Masks

Brené Brown says vulnerability is the key to connection.

That it is in the openings we create, the little cracks people can peek into, that the most honest connections form. That is the beauty of softness. It draws others closer.

In a world that is not defined solely by physical presence, we can show softness in more ways than ever. Digitally. Through aesthetic. Through presence without performance. Modern civilisation offers us protection through legal, social, and cultural structures that allow for new forms of vulnerability. We wear what we want. We move through communal spaces among strangers and feel safe enough to let our guard down.

But softness invites proximity. And in nature, proximity always comes with a risk.

What draws in connection can also attract harm.

Softness can be weaponised.

Sometimes unknowingly. Sometimes with intent.

It can attract the things that give us strength, but also hide the things we are not ready to show.

In a world that rewards performance, those who can offer a soft exterior while shielding their core are often the ones who thrive.

So is vulnerability honest? Maybe. Sometimes softness is real all the way through. But not everything is a marshmallow.

We often think of masks as hard things. Especially for men. I wore that mask for a long time.

It helped. A boy became a soldier.

But now, stepping back into the world, I am sometimes afraid.

What if this newer version of me, the one who loves flowers and silence and small kindnesses, is just another mask?

An illusion I have crafted to make softness look believable.

Truth is, I am both.

Not a neat stack of layers, but a tension between two truths.

I have lived enough to know I can love the bloom of spring and protect the people I care about with tenderness, even strangers.

But I have also lived long enough to know I can be the worst person I have ever met.

Given the right conditions.

We all use what we need to survive.

The tools we reach for differ, but softness is still the best one I have found for connection.

And that is what is different about this season of my life. I am isolated.

I have business partners, mentors, and friends.

But most days, I am alone in the studio, circling ideas no one else sees yet. I wish I could say softness helps with that, but it does not.

It does not drag me out of bed. It does not tell me to paint. It does not sit beside me after a depressive episode or carry me to the gym at 6 a.m. when I have not been looked at or heard for days.

That is the hard part of me. The one who still wears the mask. The one who will not let me fail.

But even that version knows he can only take me so far.

To survive on the edge of something, whether art or truth or the unknown, I need both.

The hard part gets me up.

The soft part keeps me connected.

They work in tandem, even if they are in conflict.

I wish I could find a bridge between them.

Some way to sit comfortably in the middle.

But maybe that is the point.

Maybe the balance was never comfort. Maybe it is tension.

And the dream of ease is just another fantasy.

Bait

Some of the softest looking things in the world are also the most dangerous.

The velvet petal of an oleander. The shimmering skin of a blue poison dart frog. The curve of a jellyfish bell, pulsing quietly beneath the tide.

Even the marble-like softness of a pufferfish before it swells. All designed to draw you closer before revealing something else.

Softness is never just softness.

It is a signal. A strategy. A system.

Across nature, beauty seduces in order to survive. Flowers bloom not for aesthetics but to attract pollinators. Colour warns, deceives, and tempts. The more vivid the display, the more likely it is doing something underneath. And the same is true of us.

Beauty takes advantage of the visual spectrum.

Of our psychology.

Of our desire to approach what glows.

In advertising, colour is not decoration. It is manipulation.

It is carefully tuned to raise your cortisol, lower your defences, and draw you into conversion.

You do not just see the red notification icon on your phone. You feel it.

Social proof is no different. We look to others to decide what is beautiful, then align our choices to match. What is popular becomes desirable.

What is desirable becomes truth.

But what are aesthetics really?

Sometimes, they reveal everything. The fingerprints of the maker. The weight of the process.

Other times, the aesthetics are so refined, so clean, so flawless, that the labour disappears. And that too reveals something. That there are stories we are not meant to see.

When I think about makeup today, or beauty treatments in general, I see this collapse of understanding.

We often bucket it all together.

As if someone who applies a full face of makeup is the same as anyone else who does the same. But the reasons vary. The technique varies. The intention changes everything.

I have seen people use makeup to compensate for damaged skin. For a difficult upbringing.

For trauma or texture or genetics.

I have seen others use it as their only available path toward aesthetic power, because in their world, that was the most accessible tool set they had.

I have also seen artists-real ones-sculpting their face with such precision and control that it becomes closer to architecture than vanity.

The aesthetic alone tells you nothing.

It is the process behind it, the choice, the reason, that reveals the real character.

And that is what beauty does.

It cloaks and reveals. It performs and conceals.

It invites us in and demands that we either stay on the surface or look deeper.

Those who pause long enough to ask why beauty is being used (and how often) discover a completely different narrative.

Something more honest than the polish. Something more fractured, more specific, more human.

Because once we understand the intent behind the aesthetic, we can accept it.

And in that acceptance, we get closer to freedom.

Armour

So why do humans use beauty?

We are the apex predator. The pinnacle vertebrae. Upright, self-aware, fluent in tools and language. More sophisticated than anything else we’ve observed in nature.

The spine bends and flexes.

The tree trunk stands tall and unmoving.

But maybe strength does not come from resisting pressure.

Maybe it comes from moving with it.

Adapting.
Contorting.
Manipulating what is around you rather than trying to withstand it.

That might be what softness really is. A tool for movement, not for stasis.

When I was a kid, I used to lose my mind thinking about the hierarchy of the body. Which organs mattered the most.

I remember being afraid of losing things. A leg. A hand.

Something breaking or being taken away.

But when I really think about utility-the kind that defines our survival-it’s always the softest parts that matter the most.

The eyes. The tongue. The mind. The heart.

All of them soft.
All of them vulnerable.

The mind is nearly irreparable once damaged. The eyes are protected by nothing more than a thin layer of skin. The tongue, soft and wet, is one of the most powerful muscles we have. It can shape reality with sound. And the heart keeps all of it alive-without armour.

There’s a tension here. Between the strength we imagine when we see something hard. And the value that often hides in things that are soft.

And those soft parts, the valuable ones, survive only through some kind of protection. The brain needs a skull. The heart needs a cage. The eyes need to blink. The tongue needs teeth around it. There is always a system around the softness that lets it exist.

That duality is everywhere. The young sapling must grow bark. The baby must be protected by the mother. The adult must learn to create boundaries so others do not take more than can be given.

I think about how often I reach for each of those tools.

How often I put on the armour.

How often I choose the sponge.

How often I become the octopus, camouflaging myself to disappear into a small space.

And how often I become the panther, baring teeth to feed myself.

The more we reach for a tool, the more we become it.

The more we become it, the more likely we are to keep it close.

That is the nature of instinct. That is how practice becomes process.

And maybe that’s how we survive.

By learning which softness needs protecting. And which hardness can be shed.

Transformation

When I think about my creative process, I think in two directions.

One is forward. A macro view. A direction of travel. Some vague territory I want to occupy in the world. Politically, creatively, humanly. It is not a fully clear path, but over time I have coagulated that direction around a position. A stance I believe might help, if I can articulate it well enough. Something that might shift how people think or feel or act.

The other direction is inward. What can I honestly do, every single day?

I hear it often-this desire to change the world through art. But I’m always left with the same question. How?

For me, it starts simply. As best I can, without fail, I wake up. I try to get my brain into a state where it can function, where it can reach for clarity or momentum. I try to get to the studio as soon as possible. And then I stay there. For as long as I can. Making as much as I can.

That’s the basic building block. And while it might sound simple, it took years to build a life where that was even possible. I do not know if it is the right way to run a studio. But if I imagine myself at fifteen, just begging for one more uninterrupted hour to make something, or at seventy, wondering if I should have gone to the studio instead of sleeping in-I know they would both agree. This is a privilege.

But privilege does not solve the question of scale. You walk into the studio with this hope of doing something big with art. And you are met with the reality: it is just you. A person. With some materials. Some books. Maybe a camera or a laptop. You can ask for help, you can build a team, you can delegate. But the originator is always you. The energy must come from somewhere.

So I do what I can.

I read. I write. I draw. I paint. I prototype. Every day is a variation on those same actions. And I am just trying to survive.

If I am short on cash, I make something that might sell. If I can see two or three months of safety ahead, I shift back toward long-form work. The strategic ideas. The ones that may not mature for years, if ever.

But even those long arcs are made of daily movements. The shape of me becomes the shape of the work. The deliverables I complete become the body I inhabit.

And I just hope they’re pointing toward the version of me I imagine five years from now. Ten years from now. The one who occupies a space in the world that shows others there is value in exploration. That artists are not escapees, but scouts. That if you are lost and find yourself near the edge of the map, you might run into one of us.

And we may not have the full picture. But we will have sketches. And they might help you figure out where to go next.

So I suppose if I am doing anything, it is practicing the art of being comfortable with not knowing exactly where I am going. And continuing anyway.

Repetition

From a granular perspective, it is often the repetitive tasks that bring about the greatest return.

The daily sketches.

The little notes in my phone.

The odd photos I collect in my album without knowing why.

That’s the stuff that compounds.

The micro-decisions that slowly change the texture of the work.

But the more you do them-and the more you raise their complexity-the harder they are to maintain. That is when something shifts. The system needs release. It becomes time to play a bigger shot. To finish something larger. To commit to something that takes more time and more risk.

Some actions are high effort, but you only need to do them once.

Quitting the job.

Paying for the studio.

Marrying the one.

And even though those decisions feel like the ones that change your life, it is usually the millions of small choices that lead up to them that matter more. The slow, steady shoring up of mental health. The incremental deepening of a relationship. The vulnerability. The trust. The days when no one believed in you-but you still believed in yourself.

When I think about the actions that shape my life, I always return to frequency first.

Because if I cannot do something over and over, then maybe I do not need to do it once really well.

Repetition is the measure.

I do not care about one perfect painting. I care about showing up to paint.

I do not care about one brilliant paragraph. I care about being in conversation with language every day.

If I want to change, I reach for the reps. I let the practice shape the outcome.

Big goals tend to take care of themselves, anyway.

They are the byproduct of a thousand small decisions you stayed consistent with.

The end of a path you walked without needing to look up every five minutes.

Not a leap, but a build.

So I trust the rhythm. I keep the volume high.

And I let the weight come when it needs to.

Strategy

All of this folds into how I think about my studio strategy.

At its core, it is just betting on the unknown.

If I had to split it into two broad buckets, they would be this:

speculative investment projects and certain deliverable projects.

It is a framework I borrowed from Trevor Paglen maybe five years ago, and it has stuck.

Certain projects are non-negotiable.

They are commissions. They are deadlines. They are requests from clients or outputs from prototypes that have crossed the line from idea into form. These are things that simply need to be done. Executed. Delivered.

There is nothing romantic about that. But it is necessary.

Everything, in a way, eventually becomes a deliverable if it matures far enough.

To make sure I do not overcommit, I use a spending gate system-some internal checks to prevent me from blowing resources on things that do not yet deserve them.

But the most beautiful projects I have

the ones that echo through me

are the ones that might never work.

They exist in a space that is immaterial. Spiritual. Woo-woo, even.

They cannot be measured in KPIs or subscriber counts.

And there is no proof of their impact, no guaranteed payout.

If I built my whole practice around these,

you would not be getting this newsletter.

And you might, understandably, think I had lost the plot.

But it is inside these projects that I find my hope.

The belief that maybe, just maybe, there is more to this than the trade of goods and the performance of value. That beyond the white-walled galleries and the “nice to meet yous” and the dealers telling their clients this one will go up in price next year,

there is still something else.

Something unmeasurable.

Something that resists conversion.

I hope that thing is real.

Because as shiny as the art world can be, I refuse to believe the best we can do is just circulate luxury objects to one another. Eight billion people orbiting the same tired loop, exchanging stuff.

I don’t think you ever find out the answer to that hope while you are alive.

But I do believe you can try to shape your life in service to it.

And if the projects I care about,

these strange, quiet, slow-burning things

can reflect back even a sliver of what I feel when I work on them,

then maybe they are doing their job.

Even if the only person they are helping

is this particular lump of sentient meat,

standing alone in a studio,

hoping for more.

Reality

I feel like I’m entering a new phase in the project that is Russ Jones.

It has been twelve months since I started using my real name for this work.

Twelve months since I came back to London.

And close to nine months since I began shifting my focus from love as the thing itself, to the power that lives inside it.

Power to redefine identity.

Power to reclaim space.

Power to change what freedom even means.

I still believe love is the force behind everything.

And not just love, but its siblings: addiction, obsession, desire, envy, wanting.

They are the gravity of our subjective universe.

They keep us circling. They keep us alive.

If you have read this far, I hope this first issue gives you some context on where I’m headed.

A first step into a larger arc. Something I’m still learning how to grow.

I know it can be hard to connect the words here to the visual work.

I’m not the best communicator. I know that.

But if you are reading this now, I want you to know something.

Whatever this is, it is the simplified version.

The reduced version of what I make and why I make it.

The work itself is the real communication.

And I hope one day you are able to see the things I have seen.

Because even in the darkness,

they are beautiful.

Love you loads.

Thanks for being here.

Poets Corner

All Hail The Spring

The bareness of branches
Is fluffed to a fuzz,
Finally seized
By the reign of a spring,

Softening the memory
Of winter spent naked,
Dressing the bareness
Of the boughs of our being.

- Thomas May