Happy #100th post.
If you’re here from the start,
I hope you know how special you are.
If you’re newer,
Please tell your friends you were here first,
your secret is safe with me.
Thank you all, for everything so far.
You’re awesome.
Everything is a Mirror
It’s not how the story normally goes..
But I was not the kid who woke up every day and dreamed of being an artist.
If I’m honest,
I had the dream.
I really liked it.
And when I told the people around me,
they said it was a dream
and that wasn’t how the world worked.
And for some reason.
I listened to them.
Don’t get me wrong.
I was a lucky kid.
I loved being a baby artist.
It’s the only way I could make sense of the world.
I didn’t fit in.
At all.
But was pretty good enough at all the normal things to survive the ordeal of school.
Which I’m grateful for, because being weird and geeky at school is hard.
And I’m aware that the camouflage I had meant it didn’t suck too much.
and even though I wanted to be an artist.
and be free to create and mess around all day.
What I really wanted at that time.
Was to fit in.
And those two things don’t work together.
Start
I’ve been taking art seriously since I was eleven.
I started as a dancer.
When I got in trouble at school one day, a teacher got me involved in dance, and within a year I was part of a gifted and talented program where my world was swallowed by movement.
This was great for my brain.
And awful for my social status.
But it helped me understand form.
How my body related to the space around me.
How WE relate to one another.
It gave me my first exposure to a different way of thinking about reality.
By 13 I’d expanded to find my voice, skateboarding daily and playing with spray paints.
Unfortunately, school became harder, Art class, once my refuge, became a disaster. Art history and conventional painting were too far away from my day to day art work.
I’d grown used to so much physical freedom to express myself, and sitting and painting in an overstimulating classroom was hard.
I couldn’t connect the dots. It felt like fraud.
So my focus went to what was working outside of school.
Skateboarding, dance, and graffiti.
It worked for a while, but I wanted more.
Generally, art costs money instead of makes it.
I’d paint decks and tees at home
then sell them to my friends to pay for my art habit.
I remember the first ones I brought to sell at school.
Crits are hard. Especially when you’re not expecting them.
I wanted to do more, but I couldn’t figure out the math on funding it.
Some of my friends liked what I made, but it wasn’t enough to grow as fast as I wanted to.
Now even close.
Also, now I was selling weird stuff
I was 100% failing at fitting in with the popular kids that didn’t like my economic ventures.
And that was starting to get tough.
And my first lesson in the value of free stuff…
What does art need to grow?
Back then, I thought it needed two things:
Inspiration — to see cool things.
Resources — to make stuff.
Now I know it needs a little luck too, but this is basically it.
I couldn’t figure out how to get out of where I was or how to get the resources myself.
So I joined the Army.
Drastic, I know
They’re very convincing when you’re desperate.
I wanted to go to university and study art or architecture.
They said they would pay for it.
Turns out being in the Army is a difficult path for an artist.
Also, they don’t pay you to study art or architecture.
I went on some cool adventures, caught some bad guys, and learned a lot about what freedom means.
I also, for a short time.
Felt like I fitted in.
But what I learned,
was the cost of it all.
I learned how society builds identities,
How we control each other,
through words, narratives, and material reality.
It helped me experience first hand the elements of my artistic research that I’m still trying to understand today.
Freedom
We all have a tough relationship with freedom.
It’s something we all want.
But having the ability and resources to get it.
That’s difficult.
And when we finally get it, that phase can be even harder.
As humans, we need some friction.
That tension lets us know we exist.
Like the weight of a blanket at night.
It reminds us we exists.
Freedom is a more complex sensation,
because with it comes a lack of feedback.
The military taught me a lot
how power works,
how people use it,
the importance of time,
of perspective,
of how critical the field of view is.
But above all
It gave me space to understand
That reality is malleable.
And if you have the right resources,
and the right angle,
you can change the world pretty quickly.
For yourself
and for those around you…
Once I realized
How much of reality
was being “altered”,
for me,
for those around me,
for all of us
I began the process of leaving.
And beginning to build my own.
Doing Art
Seven years ago, I quit everything.
I couldn’t figure out how to apply to Art School.
Or fund what I was doing.
So I moved to London and started working.
It took a year or so to start making things worth sharing, but it happened.
Mirrors
The first project that clicked was when I started putting these up:
They went viral, and a bunch of people asked if they could put them up for me.
A collector I’d met before the project liked the idea and gave me his Apartment in London to work from for six months .
Elif Shafak spent three pages talking about the project in one of her books
Another collector saw me and helped to fund the rest of the project.
The same person flew me out to his Hotel in St Tropez and introduced me to his wife over breakfast. I was lost, it was a lot…
We sat down, and I explained what I wanted to do, I didn’t really understand how being an artist worked then.
I still don’t.
But I figured all I needed was resources.
A studio and time to work.
Halfway through, he stood up. The markets were opening in London, and he was a trader. He yells over to me while I sit next to his wife.
“We can help, we’ll just get you a studio.
a nice big one like Antony Gormley, do you like him?”
“show her your work…”
Still a little confused by everything, I got out my phone and started scrolling through my posters.
By his point, I’d put up around 800 and collected 50 or so back up before I lost them.
Her words still echo around my head
“It’s not really art”
more next week?
As you’re reading this, I’m on day five of a silent retreat.
While writing it, I’m about six hours away from going silent: meditating twelve hours a day at a monastery without any human contact.
I’m still learning how to enjoy talking about myself, but a few people I trust insisted that I should make this. So this post is for them.
Hopefully, the monks at the retreat don’t steal my art energy.
If they do, this will be my last post.
If they don’t, I won’t say anything else about my history until post #200.
Unless you want me to continue the story next week….
If so, click the image below or reply.
You’re in charge here,
Just say what you want.
love you loads,
R x