Hi everyone. New music landed this week, and there’s a lot here worth sitting with while you make something.

Quite a good one. Plenty to get your ears around.

We’ve got the Prince song that coincided with the 10th anniversary of his passing (I can’t believe it’s been ten years already). We’ve also got new stuff from Pulp, Lana Del Rey, Foo Fighters, Massive Attack with Tom Waits, and Future Islands.

I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the Lana song, so you’ll have to do that yourself.

MASSIVE ATTACK + TOM WAITS : BOOTS ON THE GROUND

Otherwise, the standout for me has to be the Massive Attack and Waits track.
‘Boots on the Ground’ is a military drill stomp straight out of Full Metal Jacket. Waits’ voice is more gravelly than ever, scarred by life. War is rendered in hard, unflinching images, senators hiding like bloated ticks, the metallic spit of bullet casings hitting the floor. The marching drums cut through it all, holding a line between order and chaos, while the guitars feel as evil as the thing they’re describing. It builds to a final passage that left me thinking about how thin the line really is between the oppressed and the oppressor. It’s profound and powerful, one of the best things I’ve heard for ages.

PULP: OPEN STRINGS

Pulp’s ‘Open Strings’ is absolutely gorgeous. It’s mushy in that ironic way only Jarvis can pull off without tipping into cheese. The wit is still there, but it’s softened now, wrapped in this nostalgic, sepia swell that asks you to really sit with the idea of love and how far it reaches. There’s a completeness to Pulp at this point, a kind of earned wisdom. They can take on the big emotional territory with real authenticity, without ever sounding heavy-handed. It’s beautiful, it’s simple and it’s almost perfect. Not a banger, not an anthem, but something quieter and maybe more lasting. Very, very sweet.

FUTURE ISLANDS: ONE DAY

I love Future Islands, and I’m always excited to hear where they head next. This is brilliant, them at their best. It’s a tune. The poetry is spot on, the craft is so tight. It even rhymes. Yes, it’s got all the emotion you’d expect, pulling at the tension between hope and loss, those two sides of the same coin that sit uncomfortably together in the work. As always, the pain is palpable, but it’s contrasted with such uplifting imagery that sees suffering explode into effervescent, almost immortal stars.

And that sound that only Future Islands has is so refined now that I’d go as far as to say it’s becoming iconic. Samuel T. Herring’s performance is delicious, and the sheer scope of his vocal, and the sincerity, really hits you. ‘One Day’ isn’t a step change, it’s more of the band you already love, and that’s exactly why it works. It’s up there with the best stuff they’ve done so far. Worth getting your ears around, and it’ll probably be in heavy rotation in my studio for a while.

FOO FIGHTERS: WINDOW

The Foo Fighters track opens with a rock-steady stomp that fans will immediately lock into. This time there’s a slightly baggy, Britpop edge, with a catchy, twangy guitar hook and a late ’90s swagger that feels more Manchester than Seattle. It works. It’s a strong pop-rock track, and the idea of someone letting light into your life like a window cleaner is a nice image. It just doesn’t quite push far enough lyrically to stay with you. Still, if you want something easy and uplifting for a summer weekend, it’ll sit happily on a BBQ playlist.

PRINCE: WITH THIS TEAR

I don’t want to add any more noise to the conversation around the Prince release. I’m already upset enough that he’s not here. But honestly, there has to be better work sitting in the Vault. I don’t understand what the estate is doing. This isn’t enough. The production feels strange, those mid-90s Cubase strings are hard to get past. His voice, though, still cuts through everything. Hearing it moves something in me every time. If you’ve not heard this one, you might be better off leaving it for now, and holding onto the Prince you already know. That feels like the right place to leave him.

In this episode, Stuart Semple reads his latest essay from Diary of an Artist, reflecting on leaving London, creative burnout, and why stepping away from the centre of the art world might be the best decision an artist can make.

If you’ve ever questioned whether you need to be in London to “make it”, or found yourself searching things like “should artists live in London”, “leaving London creative career”, or even “Stuart Semple London art scene”, this one’s for you.

✨ What this episode covers

• Why London can feel creatively limiting despite its opportunities

• The psychological shift from city life to coastal living

• The reality behind the London art scene and creative industries

• A personal story of building a career beyond the capital

• How moving away led to more exhibitions, museum work, and global projects

• The rise of artists leaving London and working remotely

• Finding space, clarity, and better work outside major cities

🌊 Key themes

This is not a rant about London. It’s a deeper look at:

• Creative independence vs. creative pressure

• Identity and place in an artist’s life

• The myth that success only happens in big cities

• Building a meaningful career on your own terms

🧠 Why listen?

Whether you’re an artist, writer, or creative thinker, this episode speaks to a question many people are quietly asking:

Do I actually need to be in London to succeed?

It also gives context to Stuart’s wider journey, for anyone who may have come across his work, his writing, or searched for more about his career and creative life.

📍 About Stuart Semple

Stuart Semple is a British artist known for his paintings, public artworks, and for founding Culture Hustle, a platform that has supplied innovative materials to artists all over the world.

After a decade in London, he returned to the coast, where he continues to make work, write, and build projects including the public gallery GIANT.

🔎 Related searches this episode connects with

• Leaving London as an artist

• London art scene reality

• Stuart Semple artist story

• Culture Hustle founder interview

• Creative life outside London

• Do you need to live in a big city to be successful

📩 Subscribe

If you prefer listening to essays while walking, painting, or travelling, subscribe to get new episodes as they drop.

You can also read the original essay at:
👉 diaryofanartist.co.uk

It feels like I can see the edge of the earth. The infinitesimally thin line where the sea meets the sky remains unwavering despite the throbbing rhythm of billions of tonnes of water. The sky is grey, and the water too. This is England after all. My toes are safely placed on terra firma, a few centimetres from the inept edge of the wave retreating to its source.

I need this.

To the London-centric, or the die-hard city dweller, the very idea of not being there is backward, provincial, and lesser than. In some way, a surrender or a failing. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not. There are benefits that you can’t imagine, and there’s a reason why millions and millions of people have chosen a different life. The biggest exodus has been in the creative class, so if that’s you, and you’re thinking of making a change, my simple advice is to do what you want, not what you’re told.

YOU CAN TAKE THE BOY FROM THE COAST, BUT YOU CAN’T TAKE THE COAST FROM THE BOY.

After a decade in the capital, I left London in 2014 to return to the coast. The city has no horizon, and in day-to-day life, there’s no way to walk to the edge of things, look into forever and daydream. The insular experience of being disconnected from nature and the planet itself is so subtle that it’s easy for a metropolis to hide it. I longed for expanse, and whilst I lived there, I needed to leave every few months.

Every single time that the train pulled out of Waterloo station, I’d feel a physical weight being lifted off my shoulders. As I rolled back into the station on my return, there was no mistaking the feeling of the burden being put back.

I have a theory, hear me out. We have a left brain and a right brain. The myth is that one side is linguistic, and the other is pictures. One is analytical and the other creative. But actually, we now know that’s rubbish; all the brain is involved in everything, but the hemispheres are different. The left side is hyper-focused, laser sharp, tight. Get the food, eat the food. The right side is broad and open, a wider awareness, scanning the periphery for danger. My idea is that city life locks you in the left. Life outside it feels like the right.

GOING BACK TO GO FORWARD

To understand why I left, I probably need to explain how I ended up in London in the first place.

The year is 2003, and I’m a young painter who’s had a couple of shows in London but still paints from my spare bedroom in Dorset. I’m sitting on the floor in Derring St as the gallerist who arguably wrote the rulebook for the London art scene handed me a stack of Warhol drawings of shop windows. To my right, a Damien Hirst (who started off as a technician for the gallery) sheep in a vitrine, to my left a huge Ron Mueck head and in front of me a series of Warhol portraits of Beuys.

Anthony d’Offay was quiet, contemplative and kind. He’d just stepped off the gallery treadmill and closed the biggest gallery in town. I’ve always admired him for having the courage to leave whilst at the top. I also know that subtly, behind the scenes, he’s helped more artists and more galleries to bring art to more people than almost anyone else. When he shut shop, his personal collection became the property of the nation, and it’s due to Anthony that everyday people across the UK can see seminal, important work by the likes of Mapplethorpe, Hirst and Warhol in regional museums as part of his Artist Rooms donation.

“Anthony, how on earth do you sell these?” I asked. “I’d want to keep them all.” He simply explained, “I’m an art dealer, it’s my job,” before changing the subject.

“My boy, we need to get you to London.” I looked back uneasily. There was no way I could afford to do that; I barely scraped together the train fare to come and meet him in the first place. “If Tracey can make it here from Margate, you can get here.”

IF YOU CAN MAKE IT HERE, YOU CAN MAKE IT ANYWHERE

And get there I did. With the support of a couple of people who really believed in me and Anthony’s belief in my work, within a couple of months, I found myself in a loft in East London. One chair, a dying Dell laptop and a back-ache-inducing futon.

I’d never felt so lonely or isolated. Weeks would go by without really speaking to anyone. I became the weird guy in the bus line who would spark up a random conversation.

Where I was from, everyone said hi to everyone. Here it was a bit different, but I had my work for company and took Anthony’s advice to keep my head down.

A decade passed, faster than I could ever imagine. One thing led to another. I’d had a series of shows in London, moved studios a couple of times and made some real friends for life. I’d made a lot of work, looking back on it, very little that I loved, and I’d travelled for shows in Milan, New York and Hong Kong. I met my life partner, had a boy, wrote for an art magazine and even directed the programme for an art gallery.

On paper, I’d made it, but inside, I was unhappy. I was still a fish out of water. I never really belonged in that life. I was always visiting, and there was always a gnawing calling to go home.

I get it, some people’s work is inspired by urban living, the city itself, being in the thick of it. Mine never was.

There’s nothing special about moving to a big city for work, either. Loads of people do it every day. I don’t regret it, and I’d definitely recommend it if you can. There’s no doubt it laid the foundation for the work I’ve made since. However, it’s not the 90s anymore. We don’t need to arrange to meet people at a fixed location at a fixed time and hope they show up; we’ve got mobile phones. We don’t need to frequent the right bar to be part of a scene. We have global networks online. And we don’t need to look people in the physical eye to collaborate with them.

EXODUS

In 2014, lots of people started leaving London. The art scene had changed. Nothing in East London was ungentrified. The ‘real artist loft’ had gone from something we cobbled together from anything we could find, to web developer chic pads, to Foxtons rental traps for bankers to blow their bonuses on. The spirit of collaboration was replaced with one of competition. At the start, it was artists in it together, supporting one another, helping where we could. Most of the bigger artists had already left my building. Doig was in Trinidad, and Ofili too. Annie and Idris were there, although we never met, and Raquib Shaw had some kind of jungle going in the basement under me, which meant I never needed any heating in the winter, until he moved out. Other friends of mine headed to Berlin, and those who worked in fashion, film or photography found themselves in LA, where they said they could actually get paid.

THE KNOCK

We’d just done a big show at Selfridges during Frieze. The opening was the previous night, and we got back late after accidentally dropping a pot of paint in the street outside, as we got out of the Addison Lee; that bright pink paint splat is still there.

The studio was chaos, bits of stuff everywhere. The ground floor overlooking the canal was where we worked, and above that was a mezzanine, where I slept. The glass frontage overlooked the canal and provided little protection from the honking Canadian geese in season, which guaranteed little to no sleep. Suddenly, a knock on the door foreshadowed a middle-aged gentleman in an ill-fitting woollen suit with a leather folder. I went down in my pyjamas. “Do you live here?” he asked. “Yes,” I smiled back. He handed me a piece of paper that would change everything. I had 30 days to leave, or I’d need to pay tens and tens of thousands in fines.

The issue was that the studio was never a live-work. The landlord told me it was, my lease told me it was. I was paying for a live-work. The council had other ideas. I wasn’t allowed to live in it, and they’d be back to check. The deal with the landlord was iron-clad; live there or not, I still needed to pay to the end of the lease. Maybe it was time to head home.

PACKING MY BAGS

I knew it was the work that was sustaining me, not the city. And the fact was, very little of what was going on had anything to do with London at all. For the last few years, almost everything I made was going overseas, and the galleries in NY, Milan and HK were keeping me busy. So I didn’t really need to be paying Zone One prices to express myself anymore.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned over the last couple of decades is knowing when to walk away. Every gambler knows that on a long enough timeline, the casino always wins. And quitting when you are ahead is the only answer; however, it takes courage, and leaving a relatively successful career in London could look totally nuts to well-meaning people.

My business manager told me disparagingly that “moving out would be the kiss of death, and that I’d lose everything”. Maybe he was right, maybe I would lose that life, but maybe I wasn’t there for that reason in the first place. As Paul McCartney said outside court when he got busted for growing weed in his greenhouse, he didn’t mind going to prison as long as he had his guitar. I didn’t really care where I was as long as I could paint.

DE-LONDON-IFICATION

We know that people living in London are the minority, there are only 16% of them, and the rest of the population is spread over the country. The BBC moved out of the city to Manchester, and the Arts Council have ploughed a fortune into supporting arts and culture outside the capital. Tracey Emin moved back to Margate and fostered a cultural rebirth. Jake and Dinos left, Jake to Hastings and Dinos to LA. Damien Hirst always had his place in Devon, and his mega-studio is in Stroud. When the pandemic hit, and people found out they could work remotely, it wasn’t so weird to choose another life. Bruton, The Cotswolds, Margate, St Leonards, Manchester. All absolutely heaving with a creative class who can quite literally do their thing from anywhere. And the word is, it’s worth it, life is better.

CREATIVE HORIZONS

As I look out across the harbour, the lapping of the waves threatens to freeze my toes. I remember that this was John Lennon’s favourite view on earth. He’d stay in Sandbanks with his Aunt Mimi, in fact, his OBE would end up on top of her telly. Poole has been my home too, for over a decade. This coastline has something about it that you can’t quite put your finger on. PJ Harvey lives by it, and there’s no doubt it fuels what she makes, too. Tolkien looked into it and wrote The Lord of the Rings. Robert Louis Stevenson imagined Treasure Island. Hardy’s cottage isn’t far away. Lucian Freud pulled his pants down in nearby Bournemouth Square and got chucked out of school, and Beardsley made some of his most shocking work here.

WHAT’S IT LIKE?

It’s a lot more relaxed. I feel like I have time to think and breathe, and my work doesn’t need to be rushed. I feel like I’m making better work. I’ve been able to give my son a connection with nature and a childhood that wouldn’t have been possible in London. Technology means I can collaborate with people all over the world. In fact, I’m sure I’m having more interesting conversations with more people than I ever would hanging around at private views in London. There’s no getting away from the fact that it’s much less expensive; we are in a cost-of-living crisis after all. And there’s a real sense of community, an actual neighbourhood, and I’m convinced that it has health benefits that we don’t yet understand.

FEARS TURN TO DUST

As for my business manager’s fears, they turned out to be wrong. I never left London as some career move; I did it for the work, but it was only once I’d gone that things seemed to open out properly. I carried on having solo shows in London, then in places like LA and Hong Kong, and found myself working with museums too, including Dulwich Picture Gallery. Public projects came in from places like Melbourne and Denver, and Happy Clouds turned up in Hong Kong, Toronto, Dublin and even Moscow. I somehow found the headspace to write my first book, and in a strange accident of fate, I also started making art materials for other artists, which grew into something that has now sent more than half a million paints out into the world.

What really surprised me was that the traffic didn’t only flow one way. With help from the Arts Council, I ended up founding a public gallery ‘GIANT’ in my hometown, bringing major international artists back to the coast I’d grown up on. And while everyone tells you that you have to go to London, I started seeing the opposite happen too, artists leaving it, and even people coming from overseas to work with my studio by the sea. That was the point I really understood it. Leaving London hadn’t taken me away from anything. It had given me the space to build something bigger on my own terms.

If I can do it from here, you can do it from anywhere. Your creative voice is best used where you feel most like yourself. I know if I had stayed in the city, I’d have died a slow death of burnout, and my perspective would have narrowed. When you step outside it, you realise you’re part of something much bigger.

Don’t let anyone tell you where you need to live, or how you need to live. If they judge your location as some sign of success or failure, they clearly haven’t got the memo that, as long as artists can express themselves, we’ll be perfectly happy anywhere.

The gallery is packed, but I’m not there yet. I’m in the toilet, throwing up with the anxiety of walking in. The last twelve months have been spent in hermit-like isolation, doing my best to make some paintings I don’t completely hate. In ten minutes, I’d know if it was all worth it.

ON THE FENCE

So how do we decide what artistic success looks like? Is there a singular metric, outcome or condition that we can use to declare a winner or a loser?

The media obviously uses money as the gauge. An impressive price attached to an artwork still (almost) guarantees that it will reach escape velocity in the art pages and hit actual news.

You already know the argument. The value of something and the price of something aren’t the same thing. The love of your dog, the feeling you get when you watch your baby sleep, or a sunset. All free and all arguably priceless. Cue the clichéd tropes: she who dies with the most toys still dies, money can’t buy love, and the best things in life are free.

Fundamentally, art is an experience. And how you feel about something and how I feel about something are probably unique. You’re moved to tears by Coldplay, and I’m crying in pain begging you to turn it off. Rothko is just a few blocks of colour that your auntie could paint to someone, and to another, looking at one is a transcendental experience. And all of this is before we muddy the water by adding in the myth of the person who made the stuff in the first place.

Does a new album sound different because Kanye made it? Are we even capable of discussing his work with the same depth as we discuss one of his offensive tweets? Does Jeff Koons have more to prove than someone starting out? Do we treat Bob Dylan differently because he finally got his Nobel Prize for Literature, or is he a Judas dressed as a charlatan?

Even the critics can’t really help. Their opinion is just that, an opinion. So many artists, me included, have done so much to prioritise experience over object, to escape the siren call of capitalism’s treadmill and make art for the sake of it: Kaprow, Abramović, even John and Yoko. But the system we are in is, very sadly, the system we are in.

The sad fact is that outside the bubble of art, in the minds of the world, we need a system to weigh, measure, quantify and decide. The default is price.

Even countries publish their GDP, how much they generated, like it’s some kind of accolade. Some of us have been banging the drum for measuring happiness rather than cash. When we do that, we see instantly that some of the poorest nations are the happiest and vice versa.

MY 5-YEAR-OLD RABBIT COULD HAVE DONE THAT

I work in a call centre. 9 pm till 5 am. It’s the graveyard shift, and all I get is grief from people whose internet-enabled fridges have gone rogue and decided to take over the home. Normally, I tell them to switch it off and on again. I saw a toilet in a gallery once. Someone told me it was worth millions. That’s not fair. Anyone could do it. It’s obviously a scam. Someone should expose artists.

The allegations are as follows. You don’t have a proper job. You’re conning people into believing it’s important. It’s not fair, and you must be doing something illegal somewhere to get away with it. You artists are having something else on your cornflakes in the morning. My 5-year-old rabbit could have done that in 2 minutes, even though it’s blind. Modern art is rubbish.

DEALING RED DOTS

Back at the show, I’ve finally steadied myself enough to emerge from my toilet cubicle cocoon. The butterflies in my stomach are evil black moths with fangs. I walk into the show. Everyone is lovely. They come up and say the exact same thing. “Congratulations, great show.” I always thank them, but it doesn’t really settle the one thing I’ll never know. Is it any good?

I started to notice little red dot stickers on the walls next to almost everything I painted. A dot means it’s sold. Half a dot means it’s reserved. To be plain, it probably won’t sell.

I hate the dot thing. It’s cheesy, way too much about the money. I swear, people are more interested in how many works have been sold than they are in actually looking at the work.

The dealer sees me from across the room, comes over and puts his hand on my back. I’ve been sharing images of the work with him all year. We’ve spent days together hanging this. For me, it’s the moment where my insides are judged by other people’s outsides. For him, it’s make or break on paying his staff, keeping the lights on and paying the gallery rent. Plus, that massive art fair on the other side of the world, he needs to fly his team and the art out to.

He whispers, “It’s pretty much sold out, it’s a knockout, we’ve got a feeding frenzy.” But for some reason, the rioting moths in my belly are still revolting.

“That’s great,” I mumble, “do you think anyone understands it?”

Before I know it, he’s introducing me to someone, followed by someone else. A flow of “Congratulations” and “Thank you so much” runs until about 9 pm, when the same lady I see at every private view by the wine table finally leaves.

NOW THE MATHS

You get the gallery’s point of view, right? But there’s a nuance. Whilst some dealers could be almost selling anything, cars, watches, houses or drugs, ones that are there for the money, I’ve yet to meet one. Despite what anyone tells you, nobody I’ve met who opens a commercial gallery and goes through the pain of keeping one going who doesn’t love art and working with artists.

So I’m going to put that myth to bed immediately. From my point of view, I’ve never seen it.

But the deal is clear. The artist makes the stuff, and they sell it. Ordinarily, a 50/50 split. Half for them and half for me. There are more complex arrangements sometimes, if the work is expensive to make and there’s a production advance to be repaid, or if they are supporting you with some kind of stipend or studio support. Sometimes, there are other people involved who get a percentage too. But I want to keep the maths simple, so you really get it.

I make something. The gallery sells it. They get half, and I get half.

To the outside world, that seems excessive in the dealer’s favour, but given the spaces they have to run, the costs of the fairs and all the effort they put into placing the work, and their own overheads, it’s not unreasonable. We only have to see the mass closures of huge galleries over the last year or two to see that it’s tough for them, too.

Now, here’s the hidden bit. The bit that nobody outside the art world really understands. What I need to do with my 50%. I want to break this down properly.

Making a series of 12 paintings takes me a year of my life. That’s in the studio, 10 am until about 6 pm most days. I’m a slow painter, and nowadays I think more than I have brush on canvas. But know this, it’s a full-time job. It’s not that I stop being an artist when I go home. I’m still thinking about it when I eat my dinner, brush my teeth or walk the dog. It’s what I am, not what I do.

ARTISTS ARE LIKE DRUMMERS

Being a drummer in a band is a pain in the ass. You have all these big things to cart around. You can’t just take your guitar on the subway. You’re now in for transport, space to store the thing, a room to practise in. Painting is like that. You need a studio, storage, and transport.

And if you’re having proper shows, you want your paintings to last. You’re getting proper canvases made, and you’re using good materials. None of that comes cheap. You probably have archive software to pay for, a bookkeeper, maybe an assistant who helps you a couple of afternoons a week. The lights to keep on and the landlord to keep happy.

And that’s just the studio end. I’ve got a family and a house to pay the rent on, and we all need to eat every day.

So I spent a year making my work. Paying the studio, paying the materials and supporting my family.

And I’m balancing the artistic merits of the work whilst taking the gamble that it will pay off in a practical sense. Not for any other reason than I can afford to keep going, keep making, and get back into that studio and make my next series of ideas.

ONE MILLION IN SALES IN ONE HOUR

I didn’t go to the afterparty. I never do. I’m always in bed by ten with an episode of Poirot to wind down. Surprisingly, I slept really well.

I woke up bolt upright. It was over.

There’s a weird feeling the day after a show. A strange hollow sensation that feels almost like how I imagine the edges of depression feel. All that work, all that emotion, all that hope and fear are suddenly gone.

My phone dings. It’s the gallerist. An article about the show. The headline reads that we’ve done a million in sales.

They said nothing about the work. What it meant. Why I made it.

It didn’t feel like I was rich. My outsides now looked wealthy, but the truth of my insides was a different story.

THE TRUTH NOBODY SEES

The show did a million dollars, but there were a few discounts and some currency conversion.
Let’s call it £750k in British pounds.
We know the gallery has half, so that’s £375k to me.

My central London studio is £5k a month and the rates are another £1.2k, so that’s £6.2k a month for the workspace. I’ve been paying it for 12 months, so that’s £74k.
I’ve got £301k left.

My living space costs me £2k a month. It’s nothing special, but that’s another £24k.
I’ve got £277k left.

Now I’m not just starting out and I’ve got a fair bit going on, so I have storage for my work. That’s another £1k a month, so take off £12k.
I’ve now got £265k.

Whether I like it or not I need to eat, and so does my child. We need to pay the gas and electric, the council tax, and we do need clothes every now and then. That’s another £1.5k a month all in, so take off £18k. Hardly lavish.
I’ve still got £247k left.

But I have a few assistants by this stage. Three. One full-time on £24k and two part-time on £12k, add the national insurance and the tax and we’re at about £4.5k a month in salaries. That’s another £54k gone.
That leaves me £193k.

Then I actually have to make the work. If 12 paintings make it to the show, I’ve probably made 20. I’m very picky, and not everything makes it in. I paint big. The stretchers are bespoke at about £1200 each, then there’s gesso, canvas, archival paints, varnish, proper brushes, and packing materials.
All in it’s about £4k a painting. That’s £80k on the work.
Now we’re at £113k.

Then the studio lights need to be kept on, and over the winter, we need heating. Call that another £500 a month, so £6k.
The bookkeeper and accountant want about £3k a year. Add that together and it’s another £9k gone.
That leaves £104k.

In the UK, VAT is 20%. Yes, I can claim some of it back, but it’s probably about £20k on something like this.
Now we’re down to £84k.

The government are going to take about £50k of that in tax.
So I have £34k left.

Then I still have to pay income tax on the money I’ve used to live. The rent, the food, the heating. That’s another £8k.

All in, I’m left with £26k.

So yeah. On paper, it looks like I’ve just made £750k.
And anyone who meets me after reading the newspaper thinks I’m a millionaire with millions in the bank.
In reality, I have £26k to my name, and it won’t last long.

But here’s the thing.
I have to use that £26k to keep my life going until the next show.
To fund going around the whole circle again, and as we saw it’s nowhere near enough.

Remember, the gallery only pays me after the show finishes.
I’ve already spent the money on making the work.

Can you see why almost every artist has a second income?
A rich parent?
Why it’s not really possible for working-class people to make it work?

And what happens if you do all of this… and the gallery doesn’t pay you.

Maybe they can’t.
It’s happened to me.

I ended up homeless.

ART IS WORTHLESS FINANCIALLY

My mum didn’t want me to do art. She said I’d end up drinking meths in a bedsit and lopping my ear off like Van Gogh. She might have been right.

I remember walking in with a newspaper as a teenager, showing her that Tracey Emin had sold her tent for 30k. “See mum, it’s possible.”

I remember selling a painting for more than my mum made in a decade, but it didn’t mean what people thought it did.

Damien Hirst said it best: he makes money so he can make art. I have doubts that’s still true for him. I think he’s succumbed to the siren song and got it twisted. But I know I’m still out here with that absolutely in check.

So why do I still do it? Why am I in that studio every day, no matter what?

Because I need to. It’s the only way I can make the world make sense. I need it to feel well, to be alive, to be here. The value isn’t the price to me, and to me it’s more than worth it.

The world doesn’t agree.

We all know that art matters. That it connects people. The experiences of it are invaluable. It makes us feel better, comforts us in times of pain, challenges us when we are complacent, and connects communities. It transcends class and cultural control. It is the very thing that makes us human.

We only need to look at the cancellation of art and artists, and the “get a proper job” rhetoric that proliferates, to understand that it’s under threat more than ever.

At a time of global crisis and cost-of-living havoc, I can understand why the Arts Council are under fire for supporting arts projects in regional communities. My gosh, the stick I got for getting that Arts Council grant to run GIANT gallery in my hometown of Bournemouth was crazy.

Why should the public purse support self-expression?

Because if, as a society, we don’t, what kind of society will we be?

APPLES AND APPLES AND ORANGES AND ORANGES

Artists will always lose the economic argument. That’s not where we thrive. Yes, the cultural industries generate loads for the economy, but that’s not the point.

Until we stop measuring art by the same yardstick we use to measure profit, we will never get it.

Episode 2: Dumping the Middle Man

What if the thing that was supposed to connect us… quietly became the thing standing in between?

In this episode of Diary of an Artist, I’m reading aloud “Dumping the Middle Man – My Social Media Ex.” It’s a story about the early promise of the internet, the strange shift into algorithmic control, and why I’ve decided to step away from social platforms entirely.

It starts with a simple idea.
Art, like a sunset, should belong to everyone.

No gatekeepers. No middlemen. Just the work and the person experiencing it.

But somewhere along the way, something changed.

If you’ve ever felt like you’re shouting into the void online, or that the system is subtly reshaping what you make, how you think, even who you are… this one might hit close to home.

I made this podcast because I know a lot of you are busy.
You’re painting, making, walking the dog, driving somewhere, or just trying to get through the day. Reading isn’t always possible. So this is the audio version. Same thoughts, same stories, just in your ears instead.

If you want the full experience, including the original article, you can read it here:
https://www.diaryofanartist.co.uk/p/dumping-the-middle-man

In this episode:

The original promise of the internet and why it felt like freedom

How platforms became the new gatekeepers of art and attention

Why algorithms reward noise over truth

The hidden psychological cost of chasing reach and validation

Aaron Swartz, open access, and the fight for a truly free web

Why I walked away from social media and what comes next

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About this podcast

This is Diary of an Artist.

I’ll be reading my articles out loud, once a week. No fuss, no overproduction. Just ideas, stories, and thoughts about art, creativity, and the strange world around us.

What if I told you one of the most iconic colours in art… doesn’t actually exist?

In this first episode of Diary of an Artist, I’m reading aloud one of my favourite recent pieces, “They Lied About Magenta.” It’s a strange, funny, slightly mind-bending story about colour, perception, and how easily we accept things as truth without ever questioning them.

If you’ve ever picked up a paintbrush, stared at a colour chart, or just wondered how much of what we see is real… this one’s for you.

I made this podcast because I know a lot of you are busy. You’re painting, making, walking the dog, driving somewhere, or just trying to get through the day. Reading isn’t always possible. So this is the audio version. Same thoughts, same stories, just in your ears instead.

If you want the full experience, including images and the original article, you can read it here:
https://www.diaryofanartist.co.uk/p/they-lied-about-magenta

In this episode:

• Why magenta technically doesn’t exist

• How your brain invents colour

• The weird gap in the visible spectrum

• Why artists should question everything they’re told
  
  ——————————————————————————

About this podcast

This is Diary of an Artist.
I’ll be reading my articles out loud, once a week. No fuss, no overproduction. Just ideas, stories, and thoughts about art, creativity, and the strange world around us.

The bamboo whisk finishes its job in my matcha bowl, leaving the perfect froth as I pop it back on the wooden table in my studio. I sit back in my armchair and carry on with a lockdown video that Yale made with Peter Doig talking about his paintings, only to be rudely interrupted by one of my studio assistants storming in and slamming a bottle of magenta paint next to my tea.

“What the feck is this?” they scream.
“It’s a lie, magenta doesn’t exist!”
“I’ve heard all about it on Reddit.”

‘Stash’ Stuart Semple for Liquitex

Obviously, it’s not the first time someone on Reddit has the story a bit twisted, not least because this bottle of ‘Stash’ acrylic that I made with my friends at Liquitex for other artists to use is very, very magenta and very, very real.

I pull up a chair, invite my uninvited guest to take a perch. I slurp the green elixir from the bowl and end with a customary lip smack.

“Okay, I need to share a secret with you. It goes deeper than that. It exists, but it doesn’t exist out there, in the world.” I point across the room and lower my voice to a whisper. “It only exists in our mind, but the experience of it does exist.”

Let’s talk about colour. Properly, and if I do this right, you’ll get what it is quickly and understand exactly what’s really going on.

SHINING A LIGHT ON COLOUR

First thing, and a bit annoying (sorry). There are really two different types of colour.
The first one is all about ‘electromagnetic wavelengths’. I know! But just think of it like this, there are these kinds of vibrations going on all the time. Most of them we can’t really see, like your WiFi, or the microwaves in your microwave! Or even the beams from the sun that give you a tan or make things hot. They’re invisible.

But there is a small bit inside all of those wavelengths that you and I can see with our eyes. This is what we call the visible spectrum. It’s a bit like a rainbow, and we’ve got red at one end and violet at the other. We often divide it into colour bands, but really it’s continuous. After the red that we can see, we get red we can’t see (infrared), and then after the violet we get ultraviolet. Infrared is strongly associated with heat, which is why it feels warm. You probably know your dog, bats, and different animals can see different bits of the spectrum.

Got it. Type of colour number one, visible light spectrum.

THE COLOUR OF THINGS

Now, type of colour number two, the colour of stuff. Leaves are green, bananas are yellow, the sky is blue, and my ex-girlfriend’s heart is black, black as the night.

Here’s how it works. Light hits an object.
To keep this easy, let’s take it as a white light, which contains all of the visible spectrum, the full spread. Then the object absorbs some wavelengths of light, and some of them are reflected back to your eyes. So a red apple is absorbing everything apart from red. The red comes back to your eye, you’ve got these little rods and cones in there, they do some magic, and your brain makes sense of it. There’s a lot to that, but that’s a story for another day.

You can confidently say “that is a red apple”.

So this is working through pigmentation, and as artists, we know pigments well. They’re the basis of our paints, and our graphics friends understand them perhaps as inks we use to print things. A simple way to think of it is real physical stuff that absorbs specific light frequencies.

Grab some ultramarine pigment; it’s going to suck everything up apart from the blue.

“Yeah, yeah, but magenta isn’t on that visual spectrum,” my slightly confused guest prods. “It’s not really out there at all then, is it?”

No, it isn’t, because it’s not part of that first kind of colour, you can’t specifically find it in the visible light spectrum as a single wavelength. Absolutely right.

“So how come you’ve got a bottle of it there then, how on earth can I see it?”

MAKING MAGENTA

Well, it’s easy, we use a magenta pigment in the paint. Magenta pigments exist; they absorb green light and reflect a mix of red and blue wavelengths that your brain interprets as magenta.

“Oh, so it’s a mixture of other colours?”

Not quite. It’s a primary colour in some systems. Remember at school how your teacher told you you could mix red, yellow, and blue together to make all the colours? Well, she wasn’t exactly being straight with you.

In the first kind of colour, light, if you mix all the red, all the green, and all the blue, you actually get white. That’s how screens work! They light up red, green, and blue pixels.

You know the fastest way to make a mucky brown is to mix your red, yellow, and blue paint.

So no, you can’t make a true magenta out of red, yellow, and blue paint exactly. Back in the early 20th century, we developed quinacridone pigments but didn’t really get our heads around producing them industrially until the 1950s. So it’s quite new. Anyway, we fuel pretty much most of our magenta paint and printing with it.

Another easy way to think about all this is that in the physical world, with printing, they use different primary colours than your teacher told you about. Not the kind that we mentioned in the first kind of colour, the light spectrum. But the second kind, the kind that is real physical stuff that soaks up light. In printing, they use cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. So in that system, magenta is a primary, which means you can’t mix something else to make it cleanly. But you can combine the cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to make loads and loads of different colours.

THE EYES HAVE IT

Although your eyes can only distinguish 10 million different ones, and that’s if they are super healthy. I’ve not got the best eyesight, so I reckon I’m down to about a million.

“Look, mate, I’m definitely experiencing magenta when I look at that bottle, and it’s not in the visible spectrum, I’m surely not imagining it?”

Well, you kind of are. You’ve got these cones in the back of your eye, that I mentioned before, and they are wired to sense red, green, and blue. They can’t pick up ‘magenta’ because it’s not in the visible spectrum, so what’s happening is that this magenta paint is absorbing lots of green and that means the cones in the back of your eye are sensing lots of red and lots of blue. When the red and blue signals are strong and the green is weak, there’s no real colour that fits, so the brain makes one and calls it magenta.

“So basically, Reddit was right, and magenta isn’t real, I said that in the first place.”

EXPERIENCES EXIST AS EXPERIENCES

Even though we can’t put a pin in the visible spectrum and say “there, that’s magenta,” because it’s not there, the experience of magenta is 100% real.

I hand my visitor the Liquitex paint. “You can keep it. Colour lesson over.”

I press the spacebar on my laptop and transport myself back to Peter Doig, explaining why it takes him years and years to make a painting, whilst suddenly seeing all the very real magenta in his works.

THE UNTOUCHABLES

“Get your filthy hands off our wall,” boomed the voice of an otherwise well-spoken gallerina sat behind the desk in one of London’s commercial galleries.

This was my first time in the capital city. And I’d never stepped foot in a place like this before.

My teenage heart sank towards my ripped jeans, and a wave of shame erupted towards my head, followed by a Heinz tomato-red flush of embarrassment across my face.
The fact was, people like me weren’t supposed to be here. We didn’t know how to behave in an art gallery. This very simply wasn’t for us.
Shove an ‘L’-shaped loser sign on my back and kick me out.
Nose down, eyes to the floor. Tail between my legs, I made an inconspicuous exit.
I never did get a close-up look at that painting I’d been desperate to study.

It’s not just me.

I’ve spoken to loads of people over the years who tell me they experience actual fear at the thought of going anywhere near an art gallery.
They physically shake approaching the steps of the Tate.
The one thing they all seem to have had in common is their class.
I get it. I’d have loved to have told you my introduction to the art scene was a warm and inviting one. But it wasn’t. It was brutal.

I didn’t know it at the time, but that moment would stay with me for the rest of my life.

POST COVID CRYSALIS

Let’s roll the clock forward a little bit.
It’s September, and it’s 2021.
The summer is still very much alive and kicking on the high street below my studio in the middle of Bournemouth. The huge arched windows give me a prime view of desperate shoppers beelining it for Primark.
Terrified eyes fear-scanning above chemical-warfare-level face coverings.
Everyone’s a stranger, in the strangest of times.
Desperately, they snagged some real-world dopamine and buyer’s remorse after an atomised Covid lockdown.
My whole studio had been working tirelessly for months and months on end.
Planning, making, building. Making posters, flyers, and shipping art from the far reaches of planet Earth.

Today was the day we would share what we’d been secretly building.
As I walked down the high street towards the recently defunct Debenhams department store (that the landlord had given us the keys to for free for a couple of years), I saw a massive queue for Wetherspoons. Obviously, the pub had some kind of free beer deal going on to get people back in. Old people, young people, people from every walk of life. The well-heeled and the art student, all politely placed with an eight-foot gap between them.
Waiting.
As I got closer towards the front of the queue, I saw Ben from my studio at the front of the line with a clipboard. Then the penny dropped. They weren’t queueing for a pint at all.

They were all here for the art.

A queue around the block.

CAN’T GET TO THE ART MOUNTAIN?
WE’LL BRING IT TO YOU!

Small seaside towns like Bournemouth don’t have major contemporary art galleries.
Any right-thinking person will quickly tell you that it is because nobody really wants one.
This town is rotting amusement arcades, hen parties, and what’s left of nationwide chain stores peppered with the occasional vape shop or Turkish barbers.

Kids like me growing up here needed to make the pilgrimage to London to see anything. That’s if your family had any money for the train or the understanding that it might be worth doing in the first place.

Anyway, putting a whopping great gallery on the high street is exactly what we did. We took over the whole second floor of that department store, and we spent our last penny kitting it out. White walls, gift shop, reading room, and the best art we could possibly borrow.

We’d be open seven days a week, and entry would be totally free.
“How many are in there?” I sheepishly asked Ben.
“Hundreds, it’s one in one out,” he replied excitedly.
“Okay, I’m gonna…” I muttered, as we were interrupted by an older lady dressed to the nines for the occasion, pearl necklace and all.
“Is this the art gallery?” she politely quizzed.
“Yeah, but we’re full at the moment, so it’s about a fifty-minute wait,” Ben apologised.
“Don’t worry, dear, I’ve waited fifty years for this; another few minutes won’t hurt.”
She smiled, then dutifully took her position at the back of the line.

I stood at the bottom of the stairs.

Took a massive gulp of air and readied myself to go up.

I knew what we’d done was like landing a spaceship in the middle of a Greggs, and I was sick with terror.

If this didn’t work, I’d never recover.

THE PLAYING FIELD ISN’T LEVEL

Here in England, the vast majority of the population would define themselves as working class. It’s basically what most of us are. But the problem is, in the art world, we are still almost non-existent.

Nazir speaking at Remix summit in London

Back in January this year, Nazir Afzal and Avis Gilmore published a paper about working-class participation in the arts in Greater Manchester. I was booked to speak at the same conference as Nazir and sat there enthralled as his words floated from the podium. It felt like someone in the arts finally understood what it actually feels like to be me.

He didn’t sugarcoat it. He proclaimed it with a passion and venom that it called for.

“Working-class people experience discrimination in the creative industries.”

I don’t know why it cut so deep, but tears welled in my eyes. I felt the pain of hundreds of thousands of people like me who have been told for decades that they’re “not ready”, before sacrificing the empty carcass of their creative dreams and getting back in their place.

I’d love to tell you the experience as a teen in that London gallery was the only time my working-class upbringing was a problem. But it’s not. I’ve lost count of all the times people in the art world have made fun of my accent. Used phrases like “people like you” or made it their mission to knock me down a peg or two, back to where I belong. The times I’ve been curating a show and been treated like a janitor.

Not to mention how strange it feels to be in a tuxedo at a gala dinner with too much cutlery and some kind of esoteric eating ritual where, unless you’re an initiate, you are destined to fall into a bottomless pit of faux pas.

And the one that gets me most is what I call the “toff scoff”, a strange chuckle that’s half smirk, quarter chuckle and quarter some weird lip gesture I can’t explain. What it does is remind me that they are better than me, and no matter how hard I work, that will always be the case.

THE COLD HARD FACTS

Nazir and Avis’s paper, based on a survey of 300 creatives from working-class backgrounds, paints a stark picture.
More than half had experienced bias or prejudice because of their background.
Only 44% could afford to live from their work alone.
Less than 18% saw their lived experience reflected in the art they make.

That’s hardly surprising when just 8% of people working in the arts come from working-class backgrounds in the first place.

And it’s about to get worse. It was hard enough in my day to convince well-meaning family members that art school was worth it. Back then, we had grants. Now it’s loans. The average twenty-something leaving an arts degree is saddled with more than £55,000 of debt.

The truth is, the only people who would risk that are those who know that if it all goes wrong, they can call their dad and he’ll fix it. Obviously, they’re also the ones who already have the network and the resources to win anyway.

As Nazir wrapped up his speech to a tidal wave of applause, a light bulb went off inside my brain.

Twenty-five years of struggle, pain, failures and setbacks suddenly made sense. It wasn’t just bad luck. I was working in an industry that doesn’t want people like me.

And here’s the strange thing. Because I’ve managed to get somewhere in the arts, people presume I must be rich. That’s because everyone standing to the left and right of me usually is. The difference is I’m here through grit and hard work, and I want to hold the door open for others.

The system works exactly as designed. It keeps people out. We’ve been spoon-fed the idea that creativity is an equaliser and that talent rises to the top. It’s simply not true. The sorting hat of class has already pushed the undesirables onto the scrapheap long before talent gets a look in.

IT’S NOT DIVERSITY. IT’S POWER.

We tell ourselves it’s slowly getting better. The language changes. The right noises are made. But it isn’t. The slow boat is never coming.

Every young creative knows the deal. Fashion, photography, film, theatre, fine art. You take unpaid work to build a network. Privileged people start with that network already.

People from my background don’t feel entitled to any of it. We don’t ask. We muddle through and find a way. Most give up long before any breakthrough. And those who somehow hang on arrive exhausted.

The mad thing is that the creative spark that changes the world, the one that produced Maya Angelou, The Beatles, Tracey Emin, the Sex Pistols or Bob Dylan, doesn’t care what anyone inherited at birth.

Hand on my heart, I can say that there are some wonderful people in the arts who totally get it. I’ve had several legs-up from people who care over the years. Not least the legendary art dealer Anthony d’Offay. Sat on the floor upstairs in Derring St, he passed me Andy Warhol’s drawings of shop fronts whilst telling me “If Tracey (Emin) can make it here from Margate, you can make it from Bournemouth, my boy.” His quiet confidence in me and his belief were all I needed.

Since that day, I’ve promised that if I ever got anywhere at all, I’d hold the door open for others.

BACK TO GIANT.

Back at the bottom of the stairs, I said, “Right, Stuart, let’s do this” out loud before ignoring the sickening anxiety, ascending and then pushing open a pair of huge double doors to the space.

I called it GIANT because it was. 15,000 square feet. The entire second floor of the building. Our first show in the new space, ‘Big Medicine’, made the point that art might just be the cure we need to help us come back together in public space after the virus-induced armageddon that banished us to our Netflix ’n’ Chill bunkers.

I don’t know what I expected my first glimpse of GIANT to be; I’d been too engrossed in making it to think that far.

Jake and Dinos Chapman, monuments to immortality.

A monumental lifelike waxwork of a homeless man looked back at me from the other end of the gallery. He’d made his way here all the way from Australia, and at this distance, he looked the right size. Kids skipped on Jim Lambie’s zigzag neon vinyl floor that his studio team and local helpers had spent weeks installing, carefully tracing the edges of one of the gallery spaces. Quietly, couples contemplated the severity and sincerity of Jake and Dinos Chapman’s bronze suicide vests, weaving between pedestals, raising the hand-painted vests to eye height and asking us to look the horror of eternity in the face.

Sometimes private views have a palpable buzz. A sense that something is happening, that a moment is erupting, there’s a birth and you are witnessing it. The soundtrack of that, in this case, was an orchestra of squeaky sneakers on the polished reclaimed wooden floor, punctuated with knocks from hard heels and a morphing conversation made up of murmured discussion and excited celebration. It bounced off the sheer white walls that intersected the space, contradicting the leftover remnants of previous department store life. Vast in scale, and like a labyrinth of spaces and rooms.

Left to right: Sarah Hardachre, Mark Jenkins, Kenny Schachter.

The gift shop, designed by my friend who did the Design Museum store, was alive as well, and the reading area was already populated with students thumbing through the free library of arts periodicals. And the gigantic white-tiled front desk didn’t have any gallerinas; it was full of friendly gallery staff smiling in their uniform of Levi’s 501s and white GIANT logo T-shirts.

The atmosphere inside was electric. Mums, dads, OAPs, kids, students and everyone in between. They told me this wouldn’t work, but clearly it did.

The next day, national newspapers declared it ‘Saatchi on Sea’ and ‘Bournemouth Reborn’.

Then all hell broke loose. Tens upon tens of thousands of people descended, and it never stopped.

WE BLEW THE DOORS OFF

Our first show was a blockbuster. We had something like 25,000 visitors from across the UK.

I was astonished a few months into the show when both the local council and the Arts Council showed an interest. They could clearly see it was working, it was helping regenerate the high street, and it was good for tourism and local people too. They wanted to help keep it going. They’d contribute a portion towards our running costs for the next couple of years, until the end of the free tenancy.

Technicians, gallery managers, invigilators and a full-time education officer would join the mission.

We had major museum-scale shows by artists like Michael Simpson, Daniel Lismore and Sarah Maple. Group shows by guest curators with work by artists like Louise Bourgeois, Jordan Wolfson, Kenny Schachter, Gavin Turk and Tim and Sue Webster. We even ran a series of shows in our project space, providing a platform for curators. I even curated one of the last shows of Martin Parr’s photographs. His depictions of working-class life at the seaside brought the whole concept full circle.

Martin Parr, at his opening.

In short, the hard work paid off. The staff had a proper, well-paid job for a couple of years, the artists had fees for their work, and curators were supported to bring their ideas to life, even young ones who’d never done it before. No exhibition ever had fewer than 15,000 visitors.

Over the next couple of years, hundreds of thousands of visitors walked through those doors without paying a penny. They entered through the gift shop, and before they knew where they were, they were confronted with proper contemporary art.

We brought Jimmy Cauty’s (from the KLF) Estate artwork to the high street as an off-site project, and even presented ENESS’s inflatable sculpture all the way from Australia. We hosted music nights, brought in an art opera, and put on bands and performances. Bournemouth had a very arty few years.

School kids would sit cross-legged, drawing. Regulars would hang out in the reading room. A community developed, and hundreds of new friends would reconnect at opening receptions.

But the real success was the education piece. Emma, our education officer, left no stone unturned, encouraging families, older people and children into the space and giving them a way to understand what they were part of. She even took the work we did out into schools.

The true heroes of GIANT weren’t me. I just got the ball rolling and curated a couple of shows, lined up the space and sunk my life savings into it.

It was the day-to-day team that kept the wheels on against the backdrop of all kinds of insanity. MPs demanded it was shut down for indecency, the landlord moved walls while we were closed, or suddenly shut the space for weeks of maintenance.

Amanda greeted everyone who walked in with her warm smile and kind explanations of the work. Ben, the technician, could install anything and make it look a million dollars. Video rooms, installations of hanging crystals, and paintings. And with his buddy Finatan, they would transform the space between shows to look like an entirely new gallery. New walls, colours, plinths, projections, no problem. Their hard work made it look exactly like a high-end gallery should.

The army of invigilators guarded the work and supported visitors day in, day out. Policing a gigantic rabbit warren of spaces with complicated objects in them is no easy feat, especially when Bournemouth art lovers want to touch everything.

Underneath that, the gift from the goddess was Verity, an angel in a gallery manager’s clothing, who made sure everything ran properly. It was a dream that, unfortunately, only had a couple of years of runway. Most artist-run spaces are there for a good time, not a long one.

We did good, we proved it.

But the landlord always told us he’d need to renovate the space.

WE (SORT OF) WON THE LOTTERY

If you manage to bag that unicorn in the form of elusive support from the Arts Council, not only is it a badge of honour, but it’s also not exactly how most people imagine it.

Just because it’s lottery funding doesn’t mean the minute you’re approved a giant hand comes down from the sky declaring “it’s you”, and then a nice lady turns up with a humongous comedy check, pearly whites and a handshake paparazzi moment.

No, as anyone who’s ever had a project grant will tell you, the check is divided into several smaller bite-sized chunks. In our case, delivered at an unpredictable schedule over the next two years. The first would take about six months to appear, and the last would be well after our tenancy ended. No serving is guaranteed, and each is based on a progress report. Quite right too, of course. It is the public purse after all, and if they gave out grants willy-nilly, the UK government would have their guts for garters.

The clandestine curtain of public funding is nothing I’d had to face before. Outside it, organisation directors patiently wait for the gloved hand of Oz to emerge, hopefully with the next grant instalment. Like a watched kettle that never boils, the steamy apparition never appears when you need it. Sometimes it comes without support at all, only a laundry list of questions, our answers snatched back into timeless opacity. There’s no use banging on the curtain even if you’re struggling; it’s a one-way process.

Before they even give you a grant, they check you have some resources of your own to contribute should everything go wrong. That excludes most people from doing something like this straight off the bat.

MONEY WHERE MY MOUTH IS

The fact is, I ended up ploughing my last penny into it to get it through to the end of the programme.

The Arts Council and the local council were incredibly supportive. They really got what we were doing, and their advice was often worth more than the funding. Sometimes, a little bit of belief and a cheerleader is worth its weight in gold.

I often found myself between a rock and a hard place, committed to a programme of shows, artists and curators. Loans had been secured, work was being transported from overseas, and contracts with staff and insurers were set in stone. Not to mention the advertising and marketing that is planned months ahead of an exhibition. If you’ve told the world you’re doing something, you have to do it. You can’t just put the brakes on until your grant arrives.

When you shake hands with the public purse, you are personally on the hook.

In our case, over those two years, there were even a couple of moments where some of the team were paid a couple of days late. Of course, we all made it through, and it was worth it, but it wasn’t easy for anyone.

I ended up giving nearly £140,000 to the project, more than I ever expected, at times, everything I had in the world, often at the expense of the rent on my home. It was totally worth it, and I’d do it again at the drop of a hat.

CIVILIZED SANDWITCHES.

I’m not sure when Ben and I signed up for the Antiques Roadshow, but the great British public seemed to have decided we did.

We stood behind a table in the project space, ready and excited to see what the good people of Bournemouth would bring in to show us. We’d come up with an idea that our last ever show in the space would be an ‘open’, linked to the Dorset Arts Prize in collaboration with the local art college.

We’d meet every single person who brought something in, give them an on-the-spot crit and hopefully some helpful feedback. If we liked the work, we’d hang on to it and put it in the show.

And bring work they did, thick and fast.

We looked up and the gallery manager was hopping up and down, waving her arms about like a mime artiste trying to subtly signal that a comet was coming.

I told Ben to hang on whilst I assessed the situation.

Then began my reconnaissance mission.

I followed the line out of the project space and all the way through the main gallery.

Hundreds of people, some with fold-out chairs, others with sandwiches. Young ones, old ones, ones in between. Lively discussions about their work, camaraderie at the pain of having to wait so long to be seen.

I kept going, all the way down the stairs, all two flights, and out into the street and on again around the outside of the building. Hundreds and hundreds of people from far and wide, with every kind of imaginable art possible.

Once back upstairs, I looked at Ben, terrified.

“There’s thousands of them, Ben.”

“What are we going to do about it?” he asked.

“Fill the flipping walls up,” I replied. “Let’s take the lot from now on, as much as we can fit. It’s their gallery anyway.”

It took us several days to hang that show, like a cryptic Tetris.

Paintings, ceramics, video work, tapestries. You name the art form, we had to work out how to include it.

At the end, we left no work unhung.

But like almost every artist-run space, we were there for a good time, not a long one, and the opening reception of ‘The Open’ was also the real closing of the gallery.

There were tears, lots of them.

I didn’t make a speech that night. It didn’t feel right. It was never about me. GIANT was everyone who came, everyone who contributed and the community it served.

Exactly 28 months after the first night, Ben turned the lights off for the final time. He left through the back door carrying the last bin bag of rubbish. Art had officially left the building.

Mark Tichner installation

On my way out, I watched a young boy running laps around a Mark Titchner installation. His dad smiled and crouched as the child boomeranged back into open arms.

He whispered,

“If you keep up with your art, maybe one day your stuff will be in here.”


Read more from The Diary of an Artist:
https://www.diaryofanartist.co.uk/

I know, I know it’s disappointing.
Many of you are shocked, dismayed and downright angry.

I can’t contain the guilt anymore. I need to own this, to hold my hands up and apologise.

I did use AI to create an image a few years ago.

Since then, the internet rumour mill has generated a Stuart-shaped witch hunt aimed directly at my head.

It’s laser-focused, specifically targeting me; its objective is to cancel me and my work.

AND WHAT IS THE CHARGE?

Eating a meal? A succulent Chinese Meal?

No. This morning I woke up to an email from a journalist.
The allegation is clear. I used AI to help me visualise a phone I was hoping to create.

I know it’s not big, it’s not hard, and it definitely doesn’t look good on my end of year report card, but the fact is, I’m guilty as charged, your honour.

Shackle my wrists, lock me up, swallow the key and walk me towards your gallows.

A few years ago, my niece was going through hell with her mental health.
I sat by her bed on suicide watch, scared to take my eyes off her or nod off for a few minutes.

And the cause, or at least the thing that was exacerbating her condition, was social media.

This isn’t a new story. We are now starting to understand the impact of short form content on our neurology.
The impact of social media on bullying, shaming, and essentially hijacking our youngsters’ dopamine receptors at a formative stage is now undeniable.

We’ve seen governments ban social media for people under the age of 16 in various countries at this point.

The science is clear. This stuff isn’t good, and our kids shouldn’t be exposed to it.

So I thought I’d do something about it.

DUMB PHONES FOR SMART PEOPLE

I had an idea for a really cool retro dumb phone.

The thing would be waterproof, run all weekend on a single charge, have no apps, but would enable you to SMS your mates and basically have a great time in the real world.

I did all the research, found a manufacturer and worked out what it would look like.

I called it BURNR.

I launched a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo.
Like any crowdfunder, the goal is simple. Raise the cash, get the phone made, and the backers would get the phone when it was ready.

Standard. Sorted, or so I thought.

A couple of years ago AI was new in terms of generating images.
And there are still a lot of questions to be asked and answered around that.

I get the moral argument about it stealing artists’ work and taking away employment, and I understand the environmental impact.

I also understand it’s a baby and none of us really know how it will grow up.

I fed it images of various retro objects from the 90s - transparent pagers, flip phones, and a series of drawings I made. It’s important to get your head around this bit - I didn’t give it images of artists’ work.

I worked with it to create an image of the dream phone I hoped to make.

After a couple of hours of back and forth, what was in my head was finally on the screen.

YOU STILL NEED HUMANS

I then passed the image to a designer in my studio to finish off and make good.
Then we hired a fantastic CGI designer to create additional views of the phone and animate it.

(CGI render of BURNR by a real living breathing human)

I then had a series of images and videos, one of which started with the help of AI.

I saw that work as something similar to an architect’s rendering of a building they hope to have built, or a mock-up for a car, or a render of some packaging.

To build anything, we need to visualise it first.

If conceptual art is your trade, then I guess if you get brain rot, you must be unemployed.

Side note: I spend my days like a hermit, isolated in a painting studio wrestling with canvas and paint and my own inner critic.

I’m in no way capable of making crisp product renders good enough to show a crowdfunded backer what a product might look like, and honestly, the phone idea was just that, a side idea. It’s not my art. But artists can - and should- be creative outside their art-life. We are human beings afterall. Doctors can also be swimmers, and bus drivers might also be opera singers. The myth of artists being one-trick ponies needs ot disapear.

We launched the campaign.

A lot of people were excited about it, with various magazines and publications reporting on the idea of a phone to help young people’s mental health and the charity that the profits from the phone would go to.

But the internet wasn’t so understanding.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL!

KILL THE WITCH

Within a few hours, I was flooded with demands for an explanation.

“IS THIS AI?” people demanded.

I told them it was.

Then all hell broke loose.

Within minutes, comment after comment about how I was using AI for my art.

It hit social media, then tens of thousands of DMs hit my inbox.
People telling me how despicable I was and that I should end my life.

Then, eight hours later, it stopped.
Like someone had turned the tap off.

I’ve never used AI for my actual art (the stuff you see in galleries and museums - it can’t hold a paintbrush yet). As the critic Jerry Saltz says, “90% of AI art is crap.”
I’ll go as far as to say that it’s probably much more than that, and I’m not convinced any of it is actually art.

Anyway, that’s not the point.

AI was a tiny starting point for a much larger process that involved real humans, and it was just for an initial look at an idea at the start of the BURNR project.

TROLLS: 1: PHONE: 0

Well, the bad news was that the internet succeeded in putting people off backing the project.

The crowdfunded phone never hit its target.

Nobody was billed.

If a crowdfunder doesn’t hit its target, meaning the amount needed to actually get the thing made, no backers are charged.

No money changed hands, no money was raised, the project did not continue.

The backers were disappointed because they believed in the phone and the project.

I was a bit sad because a lot of time, effort and work had gone into it, and it wouldn’t see the light of day.

IT WAS NEVER A FAKE PHONE

Over time, the story has morphed.
Like a Chinese whisper, game of telephone, the story flwoed through the weird wide web at the speed of thought.

By the time it had pinged itself around the globe a few times it came back anew.

The new tale is that I used AI to pretend I had a phone that I didn’t, it wasn’t real and I stole money.

I AM GUILTY

So here I am, penning a response to the journalist. The right of reply.

“Did you use AI to create an image of a phone?”

And my answer:

“Yes.”

But also,

“I’d never do it again.”

I bricked my phone ages ago and turned off anti-social media.
I can only tell you how happy I am not to have all that drama in my life.
It’s the most positive thing I’ve ever done to help my paintings.

And my niece?

She’s doing great. Living her best life. I’m so proud of her.

And a big part of it was putting the phone down and enjoying the real world.

It’s 5 am. I’ve been lying here for about 20 minutes, contemplating getting up to rummage about and find my asthma inhaler. I’ve not done it yet because, quite frankly, the bed is so cosy and the UK in the winter really isn’t. The world is black, thanks to a super-dooper face mask I got off the internet, and the room is pin-drop silent thanks to my Loop earplugs.

Many moons ago, I realised I was an artist. I have a theory that we all are, but we just don’t know it because we’ve been confused about what one even is. I’ll park that thought for today and get back to the main point of all this.

Doing hard things is hard, like leaving the womb-like cocoon of my bed to sort out the wheezy organic accordion in my chest. But doing hard things has a benefit.

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MIGHT MAKE YOU STRONGER

We’ve all heard “if there’s no pain, there can be no gain” and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Well, as someone who actually died, I’m going to throw a spanner in the works here. It did, sort of. It made me much weaker in many ways. Cue the anxiety and eating disorders, but bring in the new way of expressing myself artistically and commitment to art.

I’m the broken record with the same old story. I wouldn’t change the pain. I can clearly see I wouldn’t be the man I am now without it, but I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy either.

I slide the face mask up to hug my forehead. Grab the little tabs on each earplug. 3, 2, 1. I pull them out, and the sound returns. The boiler is churning on in the next room. Thank you, universe, for central heating. Two clog-like felt slippers later, a hoodie pre-toasted by the radiator, and an Olympic leap over the stair-gate doggie defence system. I’m downstairs holding the blue inhaler, life-giving elixir deep in my lungs. Difficulty level, maybe a 3 out of 10 if I’m pushed.

I CAN’T OVERSTRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF STRESS

Let’s bring in a couple of concepts here. First, the idea of hormesis. Essentially, low levels of the right kind of stress make an organism stronger. You exercise a muscle a little bit, the muscle tears, but ultimately comes back a bit stronger than before. A little bit of heat exposure does you good, same with some cold, even a bit of fasting. Overdo it, and you’re in trouble.

We are an adaptive species. You don’t rock up on this planet and suddenly become the apex predator by mistake; you adapt and learn, expand and grow capabilities.

The next concept I need to wheel out is eustress. This is stress, but it’s useful stress. Don’t get it twisted with distress or stress itself. This one gets you super focused, makes you solve the problem, gets you moving, and gets you thinking. Before you walk out in front of a crowd of people to give a keynote or make the trek downstairs for your asthma inhaler, you need a bit of stress in the system. When the rats in the lab hadn’t eaten, they could solve a maze better than the rats who’d had their breakfast.

LAZY LITTLE APES

We are hard-wired to survive, and trust me, your great, great, great, great, great grandparents, times a thousand generations, were in the business of eating, sleeping, and procreating. They didn’t want to waste energy going out to Nando’s or schlepping round the shopping mall and trawling through the watchlist they made on Netflix to watch back-to-back indecisive trailers. They are certainly wern’t getting all the camera kit out and writing the perfect hook for their next viral TikTok skit. If they’ve eaten, they are chilling. The brain pulls more energy comparatively than any other organ. This is why chess champions are chugging Coca-Cola. We are in the business of preserving energy. The cold, hard truth is that we are hard-wired to be lazy.

ART IS HARD

So what about art then? Well, that’s the thing. Art is hard. It’s more than we need to do. We need to want to do it. And to get good at it, or dare I say it, even win at doing it, we need to put in the effort.

We need to build our capacity to focus, perform, and push through. The inevitable pain, failures, and the well-intentioned upstanding members of society who want us to “get a proper job”. The 200th rejection. The embarrassingly awful paintings. The feeling of not quite being like everyone else. The loneliness of sitting there staring at stuff and arguing with your inner critic about what on earth you should do next. All the while trying to block out that voice of procrastination that will have you cleaning the garden shed and peak-Virgo-ing your sock drawer.

My chest is fine. I have a green tea. I’ve strapped a blue-light-emitting visor on top of my glasses. It’s now 5.30am. I’m on my computer, the dog is still asleep. I type my password in and before the world wakes up, I’ll have written you an article in the hope that I inspire you to do harder things too.

EASY PEASY

If you want a date, there’s an app for that. You no longer have to pluck up the courage to say hi to that person who seems lovely that you see on your bus ride to work every day. Cuisine will come from any country in the world to your doorstep faster than you can imagine, and you’ve swapped hunting and gathering for remembering the two-digit number you need to tell the driver. Getting from A to B and back again, well, that’s trackable on an app. Entertainment, you’re not getting your mates round for Pictionary. There are billion-dollar corporations ready to titillate your little dopamine receptors with a constant flow of perfectly pitched, algorithmically proven short-attention-span cinema. A back-to-back doom flow and your input, a couple of fingers to scroll. Need to think about something? Fire up the good old ChatGPT, tell it what you need to think about, thinking successfully outsourced. You’re brain is a like a muscle use it or lose it. The geek squad at MIT are already freaking out about what AI is going to do to rates of dementia.

The mantra of the founding entrepreneur rings loud. Find a pain point, solve the problem, sell the solution.

I have a clear message to them:
There’s not an app for everything.

I’ve done my writing. Good, bad, I don’t know, you’ll decide. But it was hard, probably harder than something most people have done today. Next stop, the gym. But that’s not that easy either, because I don’t drive. I walk. Everywhere. Even if it’s two hours away, I walk. And it’s the UK, and it’s blummin’ freezing, so this expedition is Shackleton-level. Long johns, thermal vest, waterproof shoes. Hurricane-proof umbrella, insulated thermal hat, and a backpack worthy of Mount Kilimanjaro.

My headphones play Björk. She screams that she “goes through all this before you wake up, so I can feel happier”. So true. But true Friction Maxxers raw-dog it. They don’t even have music. I’m not that hardcore yet, and if life doesn’t have a soundtrack, it’s not a movie I can act in.

MAXX FRICTION

Ten minutes on the elliptical, that’s the cross-trainer thing that’s a bit like a stepper but the arms are involved, for those of you who don’t know. Then it’s a proper stretch. And I mean full Rishikesh yogi, ten-thousand-hours, praying-mantis back-bend ageddon. These old muscles will not ache in the morning. (The truth is they always do). Then it’s 5k on a treadmill. Today’s artist of choice is Kid Cudi. There will be pain. A wall where I feel like I’m going to die. On the other side is survival, accomplishment, and a sense of achievement, plus the uptick in biological pace of ageing I can see on the screen of my phone. I don’t do this slowly. The sweat and the time it takes me to disinfect the contraption afterwards are a testament to that. Three minutes high, one minute low, rinse and repeat for about 24 minutes, and I’m destroyed.

Narrowly avoiding the muscle-bound, opinionated reformer who wants to talk about “illegals”, “boats”, and “wokies”, the sheer bliss of the shower is a small reward.

The walk to the studio is long, and it’s cold. My team is waiting for me, and I hate being late, so that turns into another jog, this time with the backpack of burden. Whilst I was running, I worked out the whole day and who needs to do what. I make sure everyone’s sorted, then I shut the door to my studio, and the real hard work begins. This goes on for five or six hours, paused only for a brief intermission where I actually physically go to the supermarket, pick real vegetables, chop them, prepare them, all nine different varieties, and cook them myself in a dish I simply name “the mega bowl”.

AN EASY LIFE MIGHT NOT BE A GOOD ONE

There’s a much easier way to do all of it. In fact, there’s definitely an app for most of it. And actually, life could be much easier, much more convenient and much more fun. But the thing is, I chose a good life, not an easy one, and I’m willing to show up and work for it.

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t born especially talented. I’m not a genius. I’m a normal bloke. There’s no shot of Picasso or flash of Einstein between my ears. So all I’ve got is effort, all I’ve got is work. And I know that doing hard things increases my tolerance for that, and that tolerance is the only way I’ll survive as an artist, because living as one of those is one of the hardest things you can ever decide to do.

I earn my rest, and trust me, it feels so much better this way. I get home at 7. Clip my blue-light-blocking lenses on my glasses, read a real book, withstand an 85-degree sauna for 20 minutes, then eat home-cooked food, and physically write in my journal. Then 10 pm strikes and it’s eyemask and earplugs o’clock again.

Fair Play

Booth upon booth of meticulously fabricated objects parade themselves at the fair. Some shiny, some massive, and others seemingly impossible. Their awesomeness solidified in cultural factories that spit out balloon dogs, worlds inside vitrines, and giant mirrored chrome beans.

The well-heeled, the VIP’d, and the art school blaggers feel equal in the selfies they take with them. In this one, a bit like a fun-house mirror, a purple-haired, Nirvana-tee-wearing second year takes a snap of her distorted white Nikes. Her right hand, in her back stonewashed pocket, nervously strokes the edges of the ticket her friend’s friend, who works in a gallery, gave her.

The Koons-ification of the art object isn’t new. After all, any artist worth their salt will do anything to get the idea out. They’ll use anything they can get their hands on, and industrial processes are certainly not off the cards. And too right. Whatever it takes. Whatever means necessary.

Credit where it’s due.

Unlike music or movies, this hidden silent economy flows behind the scenes with no credit given. You can’t just tap “more” on the song and see who composed it, programmed it, recorded it, wrote it, or engineered it. You can’t wait until the end credits roll and see the art directors, the assistant’s assistant, or whose genius lit the scene. No. It’s simply Murakami, Hirst, Koons, Kapoor, or Arsham. Like David Blaine, how the magic trick is done is never revealed.

Meanwhile, our second-year art world hopeful wrestles a bag of found cardboard, a backpack of National Geographics for collaging, and a portfolio that acts more like a kite in London’s wind - into an art shop. She eyes up some gesso to prime the cardboard, or her charcoal won’t show up.

The money from the bar she gets abused in reveals itself on her phone, and, as always, it’s not enough. Her friends could call their dad, and he’d stop it all, but this kid has no safety net because she’s one of the few pity cases the college lets in for free. It was her talent that unlocked the golden ticket, but right now, talent doesn’t pay the bills.

Pooring

On the outskirts of town, in an old factory building whose shell feels like it survived the Great Fire, another kind of fire is raging. A stormtroopered-up technician is pouring molten bronze at 2000 degrees Fahrenheit into a mould that ironically merges Mickey Mouse with Daffy Duck. It’s dangerous to make them. It takes training, skill, and money. Lots of money. But the artist knows if they unlock the power of bronze, these will fly out of the Miami gallery waiting patiently to sell more red-chip trinkets to the boat-party brigade that will descend in December. Some of them have houses there, others have boats, and some will stay on their friends’ boats, but they all need something to flex. A Mickey-cum-Daffy is perfect, just the right level of cheek and subversive meaning without actually meaning anything.

If you can afford to make one, someone will buy it. That doesn’t make it good. Luckily for us, there are plenty of wealthy people with taste, building real collections that will save the best stuff for kids who haven’t been born yet. The Mickey-Duck, that’s not for them.

The foundry will work with any artist who’s got the cash. And if they are too busy and don’t have the capacity, there are plenty more you could try.

Damien Hirst used to make money so he could make art, and the art was good. What he does now is his business, literally. Hockney ripped a hole in him for not making his work himself and for using fabricators. That’s not a debate I’m interested in here. I don’t expect an architect to lay every brick in their own buildings, and I’d be a total hypocrite if I started denouncing help with my own work. I don’t have the skills to make a lot of the stuff I imagine. I’m not a structural engineer, and I don’t have the equipment to bring a lot of concepts to life. In fact, nobody wants to see me try to make something out of a drill and wood. That’s a recipe for disaster. Let’s leave it at the fact that it’s probably fine for the person who designs the car not to have made the car with their own hands, because we all want the car to actually work.

Living in a box.

Now, back to our art student. Her ideas are way stronger than a hybrid Disney mash-up. She’s interested in negative space. The removal of the art object altogether. She’s living in a box, student housing, eighth floor, property-developer pump-and-dump shell. Her bed touches her desk, and her head can be on her pillow whilst she screws up drawings she doesn’t like, and one-handed three-pointers them, LaMelo-style, into the toilet bowl in the bathroom.

“That’s ice cold from beyond the arc!”

She’s only there during term time, so that falls under the legal threshold for adequate housing. Nice loophole for the property company. And the price? Partly the reason why she can’t afford to make most of her ideas. Totally disproportionate. And the college gets a back-hander for forcing her to live there in exchange for the four hours a term she might get with a real human tutor. The student debt, a compounding albatross that will be around her neck for decades, but she’ll worry about that when she’s earning.

I’m going off on one. Let’s park the property problem and get back to the issue at hand. She wants to make a giant cardboard version of Anish Kapoor’s bean. That’s the giant shiny chrome thing that lives in Chicago. It cost tens of millions. It’s either an architectural marvel or an overpriced selfie spectacle, depending on how you look at it. It almost avoided the latter when the artist tried to impose a no-photography-in-the-park rule to stop people accidentally infringing on the copyright of his work.

Anyway, she grabs her phone and taps a message to the fabricators who coat stuff in Vantablack. A very complex material that uses nano-sized rods of carbon to trap light. Basically, you coat something with the stuff, and when light hits it, it goes inside the forest of carbon, bounces around forever, and gets trapped. So 3D things look flat, like they’ve been photoshopped out.

She’s seen the stuff sprayed on a gigantic building during the Olympics. She’s seen cars coated in it, watches, deodorant cans, and record sleeves. Nobody’s used it for art yet.

She taps her request to the company.

‘Hi there, I’m a second-year art student, and I have an idea for a sculpture. I’d love to explore the idea of having you coat it in Vantablack. Can you please give me a rough idea of costs and timeline if you’re not too busy?
Thanks’

She presses send and nods off, watching the final season of Stranger Things.

Painting is a verb.

Let’s zoom out and ask a question.

What is painting? Keep it in mind as I take you through a few scenarios.

First up, Andy Warhol has coated some canvases in copper. The canvases sit flat on the floor in his vast and freezing cold NYC factory. His assistant has been drinking Mexican beer, Andy says it works best. Now Andy is directing him to urinate on the surface. Over time the copper oxidises, rusts, and starts to form subtle Rorschach test-style nebulous shapes. An organic abstraction that becomes the iconic “piss paintings”.

Pete Doherty is using a syringe to draw a woman, a school bus, and some poetry on paper with blood.

And me? I’ve got my hands absolutely sticky with strawberry jam, that’s jelly if you’re the other side of the pond. And I’m smearing it all over a white plaster statue.

We are all painting something with something.

To us, painting is an act. The thing we’ve made has been painted. And in the case of Pete and Andy, the thing itself is a painting.

Big coating.

In a multi-billion-dollar facility on the outskirts of Berkshire, AkzoNobel are pumping out g-zillions of tonnes of white household paint. Their market capitalisation is 10.3 billion, and the white paint they pump contains no less than 30 different ingredients across state-of-the-art polymers, pigments, dispersant packages, defoamers, coalescents, and preservation blends. And the process to make it? Forget about it. The equipment is space-age.

Yeah, we call it paint, and your auntie can dip their brush in it and paint the wall, but it’s a crazy complex chemical coating.

Our art student wakes up to a ping from her phone. Wow. They’ve written back.

I’m sorry we can’t help you.
We’ve agreed only to work with Anish Kapoor for art.
So we can’t coat things for any other artists.
Besides, it’s not a paint. You can’t just dip your brush in it.
Good luck with your project.

But wait. “Is it because I’m an artist? Is it because they think I’m poor? Is it because they are too busy? I don’t care if it’s paint?”

She balances a huge sheet of cardboard on her sink. It hosted a 50-inch TV once. She grabs her red, white, and blue striped toothpaste and writes the words

IT’S JUST NOT FAIR

in the middle.

Snaps it on her phone.
Posts it.
Three likes later, she puts on her disintegrating white Nikes, grabs the fair ticket with someone else’s name on it, and heads out.

It’s 8.30am and a little snotty kid asks another kid “can I play too”, only to be told to “get lost, flat head”.

Same story rippling through playgrounds all over the world.

Meanwhile somewhere else the sun kisses the horizon. The sky painted in the pinkest pinks, trumpish oranges and Prince-ly purples. An utterly awesome natural artwork, scattering its awe to anyone and everyone who can see.

The sun never asks for a credit card, your educational certificates, or proof of nationality.

For thousands of years humans have held the power to gatekeep beauty.

And although we’ve never got anywhere close to nature, the closest we’ve come to that sunset is within our art.

The control of that is power.

WOW WIDE WEB

Then, in 1991, the first website was born. Actually, it was http://info.cern.ch, but that’s another story.

A new kind of public. A space available to all. It would liberate our access to knowledge, information and ultimately each other.

We were going to be connected, and we had no clue where it would end.

People told me it would be a fad. It wouldn’t last.

I told a journalist back in 2000 that I could see a future where people would almost “live on the web” and that I could see people buying things, everything from clothes to even food.

She laughed.

I called a gallery, read out my web address so he could see my work. He told me he wanted me to mail slides and said, “The internet might be something you do in the regions, but here in London we take things a bit more seriously.”

TEENAGE ANGST

I was frantically painting through a raging anxiety disorder.

Three paintings a day for a few years. Three thousand in total.

The only time I felt free and that the anxiety would stop was when I was painting.

Catharsis is fine, but to really heal, I needed to share the stuff.

I’d died for a few seconds from a fatal allergic reaction whilst at art school in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. A nineteen-year-old, visiting home for the first time, flopping out of a taxi, near death on his mum’s doorstep. A 2 am drip I was allergic to brought a flatline and an experience I’ll never understand or forget.

Like Kate Bush, I made “a deal with g-d”. If I get through this, I’ll make art.

I kept that deal every day of my life.

But when the swelling went down, and I could finally talk and walk, I discovered an eating disorder, a list of fifty-two allergies and daily panic attacks.


ART IS FOR EVERYONE

So the painting helped, and I wanted somewhere to share it.

In 2000, eBay was the only place you could really upload an image.

In those days, Facebook wasn’t even a twinkle in the fourteen-year-old Zuckerberg’s eyes.

Anyway, every day people started buying the anxiety paintings. Three a day for years. But that’s not the point.

I wasn’t putting them up to get paid. I was putting them up to connect, to try to understand what was going on in my head. So I wouldn’t feel so alone.

And real people, normal people, were collecting them. I was connected. I was understood.

This was the promise of the internet. No middleman.

Me and the audience. Like a sunset and the witness. Nothing in between.

The internet meant art could be for everyone. I was in love.

On the other side of the pond, Aaron was writing code. He was almost fourteen, and RSS 1.0 would become the way information was shared around the web. He’d then go on to help develop Creative Commons, Markdown, stuff for Python and then the biggie, essentially the basis of Reddit.

Aaron wanted information to be available to everyone.

And he knew the internet could do it.

I wanted art to be for everyone, and I knew the internet would do it too.

I’m writing the code for a virtual online gallery, yes, back in 2000. In the end, I won some awards for it, but it’s too early. We still have dial-up, and I need bandwidth.

I publish a monthly free art magazine that I deliver over email. it’s called {Still, and I’m proud of it.

Musicians started sharing their music online.

Record labels freaked out. They could no longer sell bits of plastic for ten pounds a pop.

They raided teenage girls in backwater towns who had downloaded Britney Spears.


ROBIN-HOODING IT

“Copyright piracy is theft!” they screamed at the start of every movie.

But is it? Is it theft or is it copying?

I’ve got a bike. You can ride it if you like. I’ve only got one. If you steal it, I won’t have it. Then it’ll be gone.

I’ve got a song. I can copy it for you. Then I’ve got one and you’ve got one too.

Aren’t we both better off?

Anyway, social arrives.

Lady Gaga meets her audience.

Charlie takes her fans on a wild ride.

And Bieber sings his little heart out for Scooter on YouTube.

Aaron publishes the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto in 2008.

He puts it much better than I ever could:

“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.”

The manifesto calls for removing barriers to scholarly and cultural information, even if this involves civil disobedience or breaking restrictive copyright rules.

Point taken Mr Swartz. I’m on it. And I won’t stop.

AGRO WITH THE ALGO

The mediation grows. Dopamine is the drug.

We scroll to our doom.

The craving for the next hit of interest in a sea of mediocre images.

TikTok and Insta tell us to perfect the hook.

The platform is the middleman, it’s the curator, the cannonizer, the gatekeeper, the judge and the jury. It’s your boss and the relationship is toxic.

If you make something that really stimulates the addiction molecule in users, we will reward you.

We’ll give you fame and fortune. We’ll put your work in front of the world.

Post something stupid, and 2.8 million people will see it.

Post something real and fifty of your followers might see it if you’re lucky.

There has been a change. Your followers don’t see what you do anymore.

They are not like email subscribers. There’s no guarantee what you make will make it through.

The new middleman is the algorithm.

And you don’t get paid to make crack for it to push.

But you get your share of the dope in the shape of likes and reach.


LOST

Before you know it you’re in a room surrounded by people who don’t know you.

Having to perform an act that isn’t you.

Aaron is in a cupboard at MIT. He’s pulling more academic journals than you can imagine into his laptop.

You see, he’s at a mega-uni and he’s got the privilege of being able to access articles you and me can’t.

We’d have to pay. And a lot for it.

So he’s grabbing the lot, and he’s going to liberate it.

The FBI shaped eye in the sky swoops.

His manifesto is waved around in court.

He’s looking at thirty years, more than Diddy in jail, and a million-dollar fine. That’s two times Diddy.

Aaron committed suicide in 2013.

And Facebook seized algorithmic control of Instagram.

Platforms start cannibalising the open web.

And the owners of knowledge, surveillance and attention colonise the landscape.

Aaron never got to see TikTok, thanks g-d.

And me, well, I’ve abandoned the socials.

Nobody there knew who I was anyway, it turned out.

So here I am, writing longer. Going deeper.

And this, at least for now, will be the place online you can find me.

Stuart

My phone vibrated, my accountant. “Someone’s just turned up with a letter from the court. Shall I open it, or will you come and get it?”

There’s a sense of dread that kicks in when something like that happens. Life’s plodding along just fine, then out of nowhere, a slippery banana skin-shaped curveball.

Half an hour later, I’m back with the letter. A deep breath later, and there it is, a letter in French from some kind of court in Paris.

The name at the top, Yves Klein’s son.

I’d clearly been sued for something, and it looks like I lost.

And on the last page, a number. Tens of thousands of Euros. Looks like I owe them a small fortune that I don’t have.

Let’s backtrack a little bit so we can move forward, and you can get an idea of what’s happened.

So, Yves Klein, a very famous and very important conceptual artist. You may know him for his powdery blue paintings, just a single colour, gorgeous loads of depth, all about spirituality and the void. Abstract and brilliant. I first saw one when I was about 10, wandering around the Tate with my mum. We got home with a print of it, and it lived in the house.

But that wasn’t all he did. He was a proper avant-garde artist. He worked with bodies as paintbrushes, making giant prints with them. He even sold the empty space in a room in exchange for a certificate which was then burned and dumped in the river. And you thought the nothingness of NFTs was weird?

Well, Klein was one of my heroes. But the thing about him was that BLUE. Klein’s blue, International Klein Blue, as he called it. Made by a paint maker in Paris, one of his mates. Using acrylic resin and rich, deep ultramarine blue pigment. The perfect formulation. He was so pleased with it, he even patented the formula. Not to exclude people from it, but to register his work and protect it. He was about freedom of expression, not oppression.

The deal with ultramarine is interesting. The stuff comes from rocks of lapis lazuli, initially bought through the Silk Road and purified by artists who made work for royalty and the church. Getting the blue out of the rocks was a bit of an alchemical art, with the first extraction being purer and more special. The stuff was so expensive and complicated that we’re left with unfinished Michelangelo paintings because he ran out! Anyway, in old paintings, we see it all on its own, not mixed with anything. It’s used for very important stuff only. Then, relatively recently, a competition was launched to crack making a synthetic version. Someone won, and we got synthetic ultramarine. Then it totally takes over art, it becomes the blue that’s mixed in with stuff. You don’t get those Renoir paintings without that, or the shadows in Impressionist paintings either.

Anyway, let’s get back to the story. Klein made an acrylic paint with his mate, and acrylic resins were pretty new in those days, so they were a bit rubbish.

You can’t really buy his paint because, although the guy in Paris sells a kit, it’s not great. The original ingredients aren’t around anymore, and frankly, acrylics and pigments have gotten alot better over time. It’s not a paint that’s very stable or fun to use. It’s tricky.

So, I spent about 10 years working on my own blue paint, similar surface, deep, powdery, ridiculously matte. My idea was to share it with anyone who wanted to make work with some. And loads of people have used what I made on sculptures, paintings, and walls. I do it for the love and challenge of it, on a not-for-profit basis. I just put the cash back into making more stuff for artists. For me, it’s an artwork in itself.

Artists in the past made their own paints in their studios, I do too. The only difference is that I share the paint we make with everyone rather than guarding it.

So, I made this paint, and I called mine “Incredibly Kleinish Blue.” I designed a box for it that looked like a Calvin Klein perfume. And I called mine EK rather than CK, and I even scented it like a Calvin Klein CK perfume. I painted my hand with the stuff and took a photo of it and popped it online and thought no more about it.

Seems like Yves Klein’s son wasn’t amused.

Back in my studio, thankfully, I found a translated version of the court order. There had been a hearing in Paris. I knew nothing about it. I wasn’t invited. No letters, no emails. Not a single DM on my Insta. Just that I’d lost.

The Klein estate owns a trademark for ‘Yves Klein,’ and although they don’t own “Klein” on its own, they managed to convince the judge that my use of the word “Klein” on the box was close enough to shut me down.

I want to be clear. They didn’t sue me for making blue paint. They didn’t sue me for using a color. They sued me for using the word “Klein.” And for painting my hand blue because Yves did that once.

So, I got busy. I trademarked “International Semple Blue” (ISB) and launched a GoFundMe so that I can pay the legal bills to appeal this crazy situation.

The difference with my trademark is that anyone can use it on anything for free. I don’t care. The more, the merrier.

As for Yves’ son? I guess I’ll be seeing him in court, and I want to know why he’s turned his father’s illustrious legacy into a nasty, litigous nightmare.