Parmesan cheese is categorised by its age. 12 months matured, 24 months matured, 36 months matured and so on. Each age has a different flavour, texture, purpose, and monetary value. You can’t make a 36 month parmesan cheese in 12 months, or 24 months, or even 72 months. 36 months is the necessary time for 36-month parmesan.

Sometimes, making art is like making cheese. The work I make today, I couldn’t have made 5 years ago, 3 years ago, 1 year ago. Now is the right time for this work. Some ideas have been percolating for 10 years, and yet still remain unmade – perhaps I don’t have the technical skills, or the confidence, or I’m doing other things in my life that means that idea isn’t possible right now.

The important thing about parmesan, like art, is that we recognise the advantage in its maturation instead of feeling impatient, frustrated or deflated that our cheese isn’t ready yet – some things need the time and it could be no other way.

Ever since I was a child, I enjoyed comics. I have vague childhood memories of being engrossed in Garfield comics in my school library. I also have similarly vague memories of looking for comics like Fred Basset in the Sunday newspapers my parents bought. I’m not convinced I understood any of it, but I found the pictures completely engaging. I remember trying to draw Garfield – it was difficult.

But, I stopped drawing in high-school at about the time I was told (mostly by my parents) that I needed to ‘grow up and focus on getting a job’. On the surface, that may sound like a lost opportunity but it wasn’t bad advice. It worked out pretty well. It provided financial security (which, in turn, allowed me to pursue an art practise ‘on the side’). Then, 15 years or so into my career in software design, a colleague of mine introduced me to ‘comics’ again, but this time, in graphic novel form. He let me borrow his copy of Y The Last Man. I was hooked… I was almost 35 years old but that 7-year old boy swam up from the depths and re-introduced himself to me.

A tradition as old as time

Now, for the last few days I’ve been walking through through places like the Pinoteca Di Brera in Milan and Pinacoteca Nazionale di Bologna. And, like many art galleries in Italy, it contains a wealth of very old art – but especially – comics. Perhaps not in the way my 7-year old self or even my 35-year old self would recognise, but they are sequential art, and it’s been happening for a very long time.

It’s easy to mistake ‘comics’ for a relatively modern phenomenon, especially after the proliferation of them in US culture during the 1950s and the influence of Frederic Wertham’s ‘research’ in his book “Seduction of the Innocent – the influence of comic books on today’s youth”. Of course, it’s also been very present in Japan through recent forms like manga. But, in reality, pictures have been telling us important stories, especially for those who struggle with reading, since, well, we’ve been able to make a mark on a cave wall.

This ‘old’ form of visual storytelling is easy to mistake for something else (often just called “religious art”), but in many cases, they are undoubtedly sequential art. My 7-year old self (or my parents) never thought of The Stations of The Cross in church on Sunday as “comics” – I was exposed to those sequential paintings every week for many of my early years. And, in the galleries of Italy, the stories are contained in elaborate alter pieces depicting important religious figures lives (saints, martyrs, mothers). Some even show the presence of speech!

Ever since those high-school days, I felt that my love of visual storytelling – both reading it and making it – put me on the fringe; made me an outsider because in today’s culture it’s still seen as something ‘lesser’ than, say, I don’t know, something more ‘professional’ (Doctor? Lawyer?). But now, if anything, my love of visual storytelling makes me feel like someone whose connected to a past tradition that has persisted since that first mark on the wall.

It also gives me a sense of responsibility – to normalise our acceptance of ‘comics’ as sequential art at to play, extend, and push what’s possible in how we tell visual stories to one another, to inspire a new generation of visual storytellers (and readers). Time to get to work.

I’m currently travelling around Nothern Italy and finding it difficult to remain unmoved by the grand, labour-intensive, multi-generational artworks that were made during the middle ages and renaissance period, almost 700 years ago. I’m not religious, but the work done in service of religion – the architecture, the sculpting, the painting, the music, is, I think, objectively extraordinary. Not just in quality, but in volume, too.

When I think of the big projects that are burning a hole in my brain, like that 300 page graphic novel I need to write, having something divine would indeed be quite useful. A church or god to please, or an eternal hellfire to avoid would no doubt provide the impetus to make the work.

Some of us wait for book contracts to be signed, to be noticed on social media, or we wait for those infrequent but intense ‘bursts of creativity’. In a secular world that worships money (or, at least, uses it as a measure of the success of a work), how does one find another reason to begin, make, and share projects that require extraordinary amounts of patience and labour?

It’s easy, in today’s hustle culture, to lose faith in art for art’s sake. If no one buys my work, is it worth anything? Is it any good? Am I any good? But perhaps all we need is to replace capitalism with humanism – a faith that great, good, and bad works of art help us all connect with one another, either in this life, or with those who follow us when we’re gone.

Now that’s something worth working for.

No, it’s not easy to admit, I have been a professional illustrator for almost 10 years and I haven’t thought much about the definition of it – to explain or make (something) clear. It is derived from the latin, illustrare – to shed light on.

On the contrary, one thing I have thought a lot about over those 10 years is how most people I’ve worked with struggle to see something in their mind’s eye – an inability to imagine. I’ve described ideas in words, talked about plots and structures over coffee, written down explanations of characters and sequences of events, but nothing works like drawing. Nothing.

Perhaps it’s because I need to be better with words? That’s probably true. But I’ve learned a more likely reason is because people need to see the idea… all of it… on the page… to experience an emotional reaction to it – and drawings evoke emotions fast (in some studies, just 13 milliseconds!).

Once someone experiences a feeling, they can do something with it – describe it, react to it, understand where it comes from, or how the stimulus (the image) could be changed to heighten or dampen that feeling. Once something is on the page, everyone has an opinion on it – what it could or should be. That can be difficult to hear and manage sometimes, but it’s more useful than “I can’t see what you see”.

As it turns out then, the definition of illustration still holds true – drawing, more than anything, helps to shed light on things that otherwise sit in the dark. I like that idea.

It’s easy to kill 5 minutes – pick up a phone and start scrolling. Before you know it, the time has passed – thoroughly dead. But what if, instead of killing those 5 minutes, we put down our devices and brought that 5 minutes to life.

The name on the book cover is somewhat of a lie. It perpetuates a myth of the ‘creative’. It implies that one person did it all by themselves – the writing, the drawing, the editing, the refining. But we never operate in isolation. Humans need each other to survive. On our own, we are at risk.

So, when it comes to producing creative work, what’s important is finding the matching puzzle pieces – the pieces that fit with you but also work to extend you, and in turn, extend themselves. Once a network of puzzle pieces form, the work is stronger, better, and more complete, despite what it says on the cover.

But, to do this, one needs to understand one’s own shape first.

If I’m learning piano for the first time, how long should it take to make something that sounds like music? I could spend several months learning scales, correct posture, hand and finger independence, and music theory so I have the building blocks for making something that sounds like music, but all that won’t sound like music. Or, I can learn a chord progression and use my voice to add a melody so that, within a couple of days, I’m making music.

Even outside of art, this holds true. When we learn to drive, we don’t sit in a simulator and learn the building blocks of driving like hazard perception, gear changing, mirror/head checking etc, we just get in and start driving. Albeit, we drive slowly, and with someone in the passenger seat, but we use real roads, real traffic, and a real car; we learn fastest by trying the real thing.

Same goes for making visual art. 

For years, I can sit around and read about art history, pigments and chemistry, properties of different brushes and papers, and I can watch endless video demonstrations. Or, I can pick up a brush, put some paint on it, and make some marks.

This isn’t to say that all theory and fundamental skills are useless, but that the motivation to develop those skills and delve into the theory often comes from making something that sounds like music, that looks like a drawing, as quickly as possible.

As an artist, I have many ideas; notebooks full of them. In fact, the reason I carry a notebook and write an idea down is because at that moment, there’s something about the idea; something more than needs exploring. Some ideas are huge (an idea for a 3 book graphic novel), and others are less so (a 3-panel comic). So how do I know when the 3-book graphic novel is something to pursue?

I know that a 3-panel comic will take me about 3 hours to draw. A 3-book graphic novel is years in the making. It would be easy to prioritise the ‘quick’ ideas over and over again, because the time investment isn’t as great. If it’s truly a bad idea, I’ll find out in 3 hours. With a 3-book graphic novel, it could be years before I get to a point where I know whether it’s worth pursuing or finishing.

There are also lots of different reasons to pursue an idea:

• Money: maybe it’s an idea to sell as a print or to sell to a publisher.
• Skill-building: maybe it’s an idea that will require me to learn something new or get better at something I’m already good at.
• Fun: maybe it’s just because I think I will have fun making it.
• Not fun: Or, it’s an idea that it will be really difficult to make and push me out of my comfort-zone.

These are all fine reasons, but there’s one more important one I find myself using more and more – will it help me make sense of the world?

In 2023, I sat down and completed an 80-page graphic novel. I spent my whole summer break on it and then worked mornings and evenings to finish it. During this time, all other ideas were paused, I chose this one. At the time, I didn’t know why, I just had to do it.

By the end of it, I experienced a greater sene of calm than I had in a long time. As it turns out, it was a way for me to process my feelings about climate anxiety, hope for the future, and biodiversity restoration. I chose that project over all the other ones from my notebook because I needed healing and I needed to understand more about what I really felt about the world through the act of making.

Of all the reasons to make something, I can’t think of a better one.

There’s a reason fast food restaurants ask if you want fries with that. It’s the same reason a hotel booking site will ask if you want travel insurance with that. It’s the same reason a restaurant asks if you’d like to leave a tip. And it’s the same reason that people stand on street corners handing out flyers. It’s because they all know that it’s more difficult to say no than it is to say yes.

One of the challenges I find myself confronting more often than not is one of creating space myself. The world is full of add-ons and distractions – demands for our time and attention. If I said yes to every one of them, there’d be no time left do the work that can only come from having the space and time to sit, think, draw, and create. But if I said no to every one of them, the solitude I seek could turn into loneliness.

That’s not an easy balance to strike sometimes but it’s always one worth checking in on – do I really want fries today or is it just because someone asked and it’s difficult to say no.

On my journey toward learning how to play piano, I’ve been trying to find beginner-level sheet music for nocturnes – I’ve always loved the nocturne form of classical music (a piece inspired by night). The problem with my search is that I cannot escape Chopin who is famously known for creating some of the most beautiful (and therefore most complex ones).

He wasn’t the only composer to compose nocturnes but he did it so well that it’s now difficult to find other composers’ works. Chopin, according the internet, is ‘the nocturne guy.’

I wonder – would Chopin, who died in 1849, be happy with how we view his ‘breadth’ today? I mean, he wrote other stuff too, but the nocturnes stuck and, culturally, have drowned out others. Perhaps this is a mark of mastery of the form. Or perhaps it’s a sign of our culture and the way it simplifies complexity of an artist – a ‘consistent brand’ that’s easy to understand. Maybe it’s a bit of both.

I’ve written before about the difference between chameleons and peacocks – and the perceptions that are possible to craft of ourselves based on the work we put into the world. The work we make and share is the work we get asked to make. Simplistically, this boils down to ‘market positioning’ but it can also be a trap.

The challenge is nuanced – one must make the work the heart wants to make but this will create a ‘brand’ as perceived by others, especially if that work is of a certain type. For Chopin, this became nocturnes.

But that brand also sets an expectation such that when the heart evolves and makes work that doesn’t fit that expectation, it risks looking ‘incoherent’, which, in marketing speak, makes it more difficult to attract a reliable audience; Chopin also wrote mazurkas.

There’s no ‘right way’ when it comes to art and marketing, after all, chameleons and peacocks co-exist successfully, but perhaps it’s worth noticing if the work we’re making is indeed heart-led, or whether what we’re making is trying to fulfill an expectation we’ve created in others, or by our past selves.