I once read some advice from an author that said, “Writers are too busy writing, what they need to do is just write as they speak.” I think it was an attempt at helping writers find a more ‘natural’ voice, one that wasn’t shaped necessarily by the ‘idea’ of ‘writing’. You know, using words you’d never speak because they sound smarter and make you look more like a writer who has a command over vocabulary or something. I’ve always been told that I’ve got a natural tone to my writing, but it wasn’t until I attempted to speak my own writing that I learned a lot more about the unconscious bias between my brain, mouth, and fingertips.

What’s with writing?

I journal weekly because I’ve found that the practice of writing helps to clarify my thinking or consolidate some ephemeral ideas I’ve had floating around my head. Journal writing is different from creative writing, of course. Where creative writing, or writing fiction, requires that I entertain and ‘bring a reader along a journey’, the audience for journal writing is me, mainly. I publish it publicly in the off-chance that someone may find something I write helpful, but it’s not the goal.

As an experiment, I’ve recently started audio-transcribing my journal. Again, this isn’t for anyone but me, really, because if people don’t read my writing, they’re even more unlikely to enjoy the sound of my voice. No, I started this speaking-practice to see whether, like writing, it contributes to clarifying my thinking. The short answer is yes, it does.

Write like you speak?

In fact, what I’ve realised by speaking my work is that any act of consumption or creation of art and literature has a similar effect. I love reading and watching films – the consumption bit – because they pose questions, wrapped in narrative, about important things to the makers of those films. Princess Kaguya, for example, one of my favourite films ever, grapples with concepts of control, life, death, and patriarchy. The Memory Police, a book by Yoko Ogawa, unpacks the value of memory and what it really means to remember. These ideas sit and swirl in my brain, helping me understand my own view on these things and, more abstractly, my place in the world.

Like writing this journal, drawing, as it turns out, is critical in helping me think through problems. Whether that’s drawing boxes and flowcharts in my work as a software designer, or inventing characters that act as a medium to explore things I never even thought to explore until I see them emerge on a page in the form of a tenacious echidna. It turns out that if I then try to speak the words I’ve written in this journal (like very recently), I re-interpret my own words and find new connections I never knew existed. It’s exposed the difference between the way I write and speak, which, according to the unnamed writer above, should make me a better writer.

Those four things – Reading, Writing, Speaking, and Drawing – is a very privileged set of skills and each begets the other as a way to unpack and examine the world in which we exist today, and the actions we can take to shape the one we want to exist tomorrow. Using them together, consciously, is not something I’ve ever noticed the power of before, but here I am, writing about it, so I suppose it worked.

We need a more complex discussion about that word – Diversity – and how those of us with a platform in literature can shape a more equal world. As humans, we’re pretty lazy, so we like short words that can stand in for complex and difficult-to-articulate things. I’m concerned about how I’ve seen it used, particularly in publishing, where we refer to people as ‘diverse authors’ when what I think we mean by this is “Authors that are members of groups who have been historically under-represented in our media or historically discriminated against.” Why is it so hard to just say what we mean?

When thinking about how to represent “diversity” in my own work, children’s literature, it’s no less complex. I’m often paralysed by fear and uncertainty about how I’m supposed to represent under-represented groups or those who have been historically discriminated against, especially as someone who isn’t from those groups and has a whole lot of privilege baked into my life.

There is no silver bullet here because it’s about culture change – whether we like it or not, that takes time. We need efforts at systemic and individual levels, working together over time, to listen to one another, learn from one another and, ultimately help one another.

I’ve noticed a few different approaches to how people are including diversity into their work, or how they’re talking about it. “Randomness” is one way – the idea that if we ignore social and historical context, notions of power and hierarchy, we’ll move to a world with more equity more quickly. There is of course the ‘representing reality’ thing, where we use data and research to inform our choices and remove ‘unconscious bias’ about how we represent the under-represented. And yes, while these are good ideas, they’re not good enough because it doesn’t reckon with how culture change actually works.

Diversity as ‘randomness’

Life is chaos, but we don’t want it to be. True randomness unsettles. It means things are unpredictable, unstable, uncertain. Instead, we wrap narratives around randomly occurring events using abstract correlations misinterpreted as causation to make sense of it all. We seem to call that narrative a life.

When the iPod first came out, it’s ‘shuffle play’ wasn’t acting like we wanted shuffle to act. It began as a truly random selection of songs, not ‘expected random’. This meant you would sometimes hear the same song two or three times in a session. What was truly random was seen as repetitive. We don’t *expect* random to repeat, so when it does, something feels broken. What we think we want when we say random is variety; a sort of controlled-random. That’s more difficult in programming terms, but it’s how we expect the world to behave. This phenomenon is the same with everything, especially diversity in literature.

Whenever I’m making a picture book, the characters don’t come from nowhere, they have to be designed. How much diversity should be in a country town that I’m designing? I could generate, at random, characters with certain attributes; skin colour, hair colour, eye colour, body type, clothing, etc. If it was truly random, it’s quite possible that in a country town, I would end up with a town of black people with blond hair, a bull-fighter, opera signer, french pastry chef and a class full of kids from Asia and Africa. By the same token, a truly random town could just as easily turn out to be an all-white, Christian, meat-and-potatoes eating population.

Whilst these are truly random, just like life, they don’t feel ‘realistic’.

What is realistic diversity?

The world we live in didn’t just appear. It has thousands of years of biases and discrimination built into it, at all levels – political, social, economic, religious. Whether it’s right to have done so isn’t what I want to focus on. Rather, we have to recognise we are grouped and categorised by where we live, how much money we have, how able-bodied we are, the colour of our skin, and plenty more. A ‘random’ approach to diversity, then, or, in other words, one that ignores these factors of segregation and inequality, isn’t the solution. We need to see the inequality in order to address it.

The other complicating factor is that my version of diversity will be different from another’s – especially a publisher, or a co-creator. Our own lives are biased by the factors I’ve already mentioned and that means we’ve interacted with certain groups and not with others across those political, social, and economic spectrums. For example, the primary school I attended was very mixed in race: Chinese, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, Lebanese etc. But we were all able-bodied. We lived in the same group of suburbs, and so we had similar economic contexts in which our parents operated, also. In some ways, we were very diverse, and in others, not so. One or two suburbs over and those kids are living completely different lives.

If bias is baked in, something that’s completely unavoidable, then trying to increase the representation of historically-discriminated groups in our literature can’t just come from within us. We need objective data. Well, as objective as we are able to get.

What is data-driven diversity?

Just pause for a moment. Try to answer the question: how many people in Australia live with a disability?

Chances are, if you grew up in a place that had one or more people with a disability, you’ll guess a much higher percentage than if you didn’t. My guess was about 2-3%.

According to the Australian Network on Disability, 4.4 million Australians have some form of disability. Just to be clear, that’s 1 in 5 people, or in percentage terms, 20%. A far cry from my paltry biased number of 2-3%. My entire upbringing was around able-bodied people so, of course, I’d expect that there are less of them in the world.

Now, when you think “disability”, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it was “wheelchair”. Well, it turns out that only 4.4% of people with a disability in Australia use a wheelchair. 4.4%! But it’s the first thing that came to my mind? I expected at least upwards of 30%. Included in the definition of disability are hearing loss (30,000 people), vision loss (357,000 people), depression/anxiety, and arthritis amongst other conditions. source

So, there’s a lot going on here, but here are a few of the important points we need to consider:

1. There are many minority groups in Australia. At 4.4m, disabled people are one of them but that’s just one of many, and it depends on how you cut the data, just like in my primary school. For example, according to census data, 30% of Australians are foreign-born. So they’re a minority, too. So, too, are our indigenous Australians within that context. But then, when you break any group down across race, politics, religion, and so on; you will find a majority and a minority in every facet of our lives.
2. Not all minorities have been historically-discriminated against, nor have they been under-represented in our media. What I mean by this is that humans are pretty clever at creating a context that ensures we can identify as a minority group if it suits us. For example, Pentecost makes up 2.1% of all Christians in Australia according to 2016 census data. By that measure, they are a minority. But, in a National context, where Christianity represents 52.1% of the total population, they are part of a bigger religious majority. This is especially important when you consider the laws that govern us have been informed by Christian values more than any other – there is a significant advantage to being a Christian in Australia right now, whether a Christian person knows that or not. No, it’s better to ignore the idea of quantitative comparison when we say ‘minorities’ because what we really mean when we say minorities are groups that have suffered significant, perpetual, & historical discrimination based on gender, colour, religious beliefs and physical ability: women, people of colour, and disabled people are good examples.
3. We don’t live according to data, we are the data. Our messy day-to-day experiences shape our view of the world. Because of this, we are inherently, unavoidably biased. For example, in doing research for this article I discovered that there is a greater population of Nepalese people in Australia than American. I’ve never met a Nepalese person in Australia, but I know plenty of Americans, so it’s a surprise to me. That doesn’t make me a bad or judgey human, it’s just my experience. But also, because I’m aware of my narrow view of the world, it’s also unsurprising that I could be wrong. It doesn’t make me an inherently bad human, it’s just a factor of the life I’ve led.
4. We have an existing social, political, economic, and moral landscape that we’ve inherited and it will continue to shift with culture over time. Our world is shifting gradually and constantly based on our actions and events we participate in everyday. Yes, it’s difficult to ‘keep up with what’s politically correct’ but it also provides an opportunity for us to exert effort toward making a more equitable world.

So, in place of a truly random approach to including ‘diversity’ in my country town, the easy solution would be to take a purely data-driven approach to creating it instead. I could look up stats: economic and racial breakdowns of residents in a typical country towns of Australia, and draw what I find. After all, that’s just real, right? It takes my own personal bias out of it so doesn’t that make it better? But, here’s where stereo-types and existing inequity become problematic.

The value and danger of stereotypes

If I take a truly data-driven approach to creating my country town, I might get some diversity, yes: I could draw a Nepalese family (but maybe not two?). I could include some disabled people (maybe a blind person instead of one in a wheelchair?), probably a fair few white people. But, given this is a country town, when you look at the data, they’d probably *mostly* be of a certain economic disposition and class, which isn’t very diverse. That’s all well and good, but then I need to work out how to portray all of this to the reader. And so we arrive at stereotypes.

Picture book makers rely on stereotypes. If I need to tell the reader that a person is a doctor, I’ll probably give that character a stethoscope. If I want to tell them they’re a plumber, maybe some overalls and a wrench? Jobs are one thing, but what about ethnicity? What are the visual signals for a person from Nepal? Or America? What about economic class? Do people in this country town eat ‘healthy’ food (salads etc) or do they consume ‘junk’ (chips and pies). What cars do they drive? What sort of houses do they live in? Is there a rich part of the town and a poor part? How ‘nice’ is the main square: clean and pristine or dirty and trash-filled? What job should the black person have – the town sweeper or the School Principal?

Each and every visual signal we provide to the reader communicates the racial, economic, social, religious, and political class of the people who inhabit this made-up world. Will the reader even recognise that it’s a country town if I don’t use some stereotypical imagery? How many people should wear flannel shirts? Should wildlife roam the streets? Should the roads be tarred or dirt? Do the kids wear blazers and boaters to school or polo shirts and shorts? Do they have blackboards or smartboards there? You can see the problem. Representing ‘reality’ while considering the world we ‘want’ to exist is tricky. The good thing is, we have the Overton Window to help us.

The Overton Window & plausible diversity

The Overton Window, named after Joseph P. Overton, is the range of ideas accepted in the mainstream population at any given time. New ideas that are introduced to the culture are often considered ‘unthinkable’ when they first emerge. For example, the idea of international flight in the early days of airplanes that could only travel a few kilometres was ‘unthinkable’. Over time, that same ‘unthinkable’ idea moves through a spectrum from unthinkable to radical, then acceptable, then sensible, then popular. And here we are flying around the world with ease.

A more political example of The Overton Window: the growing acceptance, in some cultures, of homosexuality. Once an unthinkable, punishable ‘offence’ in some cultures, over time it has moved toward something acceptable, most obviously with the recognition of gay marriage in some countries.

What’s this got to do with picture books? Well, it’s that diversity and equality in picture books (or any literature) isn’t an overnight fix. Ideas that move from the ‘outside’ into the mainstream, take time.

When I think about portraying diversity or equality in my books, I’m not attempting to cram each page, or scene, or country town full of as much diversity as possible in an either truly random way or somewhat controlled data-driven way. I’m not trying to make each and every character it’s own political statement. To do so fails to reckon with The Overton Window. A country town without a single white-person, or one that’s full of fancy cars where everyone eats salad is, to a reader, ‘unthinkable’ or unrealistic, because it’s not what their biases tell them is a ‘country town’. When fiction is living in that ‘unthinkable’ part of the spectrum, it’s far more difficult for a reader to build empathy with the the environment that we’re trying to create.

What we need to shoot for isn’t ‘unthinkable’, but ‘plausible’. We need to continue to shift The Overton Window, book-by-book, publisher by publisher, in subtle but meaningful ways. An accurate representation of the world we have right now is not the answer because we know it’s full of inequity already. The role of books, and literature in general, is about helping us grow as a culture, not stay the same, it’s to help us picture a world, literally, that we want to head toward. Once we make that world, the data follows.

Depicting diversity in practice

So what does good diversity look like in an Australia country town? Well, I’ve arrived at a few principles to keep in mind when I’m designing these worlds. They’ll continue to evolve as a I talk to more people and grow as a human, but perhaps they’ll be helpful to others, right now:

1. Depict at least one historically-discriminated-against or under-represented group in every book. It doesn’t need to be a single character, and a character may be a member of multiple groups.
2. Ensure that the character/s from number one are doing meaningful work. This means they aren’t a background character but, instead, they are in a position of power and they inherit everything that that comes with that: self-determination, authority, social importance, and influence.
3. Consider economic, social, political, religious, and ethnic domains of diversity. Accept that my view of diversity is itself biased. Ask questions of your characters and environments across all potential facets of discrimination, power and hierarchy:
   1. Economic: What clothes do they wear? What sort of house do they live in? Do they eat ‘healthy’ food or ‘junk’ food?
   2. Social: What gender are they? Who are they friends with? Where do they socialise?
   3. Political: What do they believe? Which side of politics do they lean on? What activities, iconography or visual aids denote left-leaning versus right-leaning in our current culture?
   4. Religious: What do they believe? Do they ‘wear’ their religion? What do they carry? What do they read? What’s in their house?
   5. Ethnic: What colour is their skin, hair, eyes? What clothes do they wear? What cuisine do they enjoy (and don’t enjoy)?
4. Consult the data, don’t be driven by it. We are biased beings. If we’re going to include ‘diversity’ into our books, we need to make sure we’ve got an objective view of what diversity is. What does ‘disabled’ mean? What does ‘foreign’ or ‘multi-cultural’ mean? What does rich and poor really mean? These questions aren’t exhaustive, there are many others, but they’re incredibly important to consider to ensure we’re challenging ourselves and using the platform we have in the most positive way possible.
5. Listen to ‘the other’. Here I am, yet another white person telling the world what I think of ‘diversity’. In the end, I’m not the Nepalese person, or the Tamil refugee. I don’t actually know what it’s like to inhabit this world as someone who isn’t me. So what’s the answer? Simple. Ask. Seek counsel from people who aren’t you. People outside of your social circle. Collaborate and elevate their voices. The world is a big place and the under-represented want every opportunity for better representation. All we have to do is listen.
6. Ask yourself, but more importantly, ask the people from the worlds you’re trying to represent, is it plausible and not unthinkable? It’s OK to make your main character white, rich, and Christian if that’s who they are; but that’s the thing, do they need to be? Is it plausible not unthinkable that your School Principal Character could be a black person? Could your plumber be non-binary? Could your doctor dress more like the visual stereotype of a farmer (flannel and dungarees) because, in many country towns, they may not wear white coats and stethoscopes, anyway? Maybe your country town baker is Muslim and makes the most beautiful middle-eastern inspired cakes?

Like the questions I pose, these principles aren’t exhaustive, but they’re a start. They’ve served me well so far and if you’re clever, you’ll find them in my books from the very beginning, even if you may not have noticed them before.

A final example: Round and Round The Garden

I have a new book coming out in February, it’s an addition to my Classic Aussie Nursery Rhyme Series. It’s not a seminal master-work, nor is the idea of if it particularly innovative. It is, at it’s most basic, just a cute nursery rhyme story for 0-3 year olds. Banal. But having consulted the data and listened to disability advocates about the support they need in the world for normalising their condition by people like me – banal, it turns out, is an immense catalyst for change. If there’s ever a time to introduce young minds to the reality of the world we live in where 4.4 million Australians have a disability, it’s through a book like this.

Yes, she’s white. But I ask, could I have put a black female in a wheelchair without making it ‘unrealistic’? Could this character have been from 3 historically-discriminated groups simultaneously? Maybe. But I’ve got the The Overton Window in mind here. For what it’s worth, I had to fight relatively hard for even this representation of diversity. In the end, I’d rather have the book in 10,000 homes because what it’s about is two siblings having a great old time on their wheels, than have a child and parent walk by it in the store because it’s just another obvious political statement or attempt at ‘token diversity’. And anyway, the book doesn’t indicate whether she’s permanently disabled or not… what did you assume?

Links to important voices

The only way we’ll begin to see through our privilege is if we listen to people from marginalised groups. These two talks, which I was lucky enough to see in-person, have and will continue to shape the way I view the world. They were massive influences for this book and my purpose as a tall, white, male author/illustrator of children’s literature.

It’s easy to look back on the decisions we’ve made or the life we’ve led and think about all of the possibilities that could have been. What if I had chosen a different path? If only I made this decision instead of that one. Every single choice we make, in hindsight, has had consequences in shaping who we are and the life we’ve led. We’re proud of some of those decisions and not so proud of others. The people we call friends, the jobs we’ve taken, the places we’ve chosen to live – all of it accumulating to shape who and where we are now. There are some choices, though, that we remember as being more significant than others.

In my case, when I was in Year 10, Mr Jordan, my art teacher, strongly encouraged me to do art for my senior years. I distinctly remember the conversation we had and his comment, “I see something in your work that I think we should develop.” Instead, I chose science – Physics, Chemistry, Biology – because it would ‘scale better’ to get into University. Once I was in university, I could do anything, right? Well, as it turns out, I went to University, stopped doing art completely, and focussed on a degree in Design (which is very different from Art, by the way). To make matters worse, Mr Jordan passed away just before I got my first publishing deal.

I can look back on that decision in two ways.

I can regret it. If only I had listened to Mr Jordan. What if I had pursued the artist’s path? What if I spent 15 years honing my craft and training my brain towards that of an artist, rather than a Designer. If only I discovered my love of watercolour in high-school. If only the world didn’t push us into tertiary careers in science and maths instead of using art to discover who we are. If only, what if.

But the other way to look at that choice is not by what it may have taken away, but what it has provided. Following the path I did led to steady work. Steady work led to a solid financial base for myself. I met some wonderful people in my Design career (including my partner) who taught me so much I would never have learned. My years in the ‘corporate day job’ taught me skills on negotiation, compromise, the importance of deadlines, it gave me the critical thinking skills to analyse new situations and make better decisions – decisions which I use everyday now that I’ve found my way back to art and, let’s be honest, have to manage a business.

The what-ifs and if-onlys in our life are the things that make us who we are. The difference between regret and thankfulness is controlled by the story we tell ourselves about those decisions, not the decisions themselves. What’s encouraging is that the way we shape that story of the life we’ve lived also works for the decisions we haven’t made yet. This means that no matter the choice we have to make tomorrow, we’re in control of the story of our lives, it’s just up to to us to write it, just the way we want to.

I painted 3 paintings yesterday, and when I look at them today, I can’t help but see they’re all terrible. But, they are less terrible than the ones I did the day before yesterday. And when I compare the ones I did the day before that to the ones I did 3 months before, or 6 months before, or 5 years before, I realise that the older the work, the worse it is. But using this logic, it also means that the work I’ve just done today, the work that, right now, I think is my best work, won’t be my best tomorrow.

Maybe feeling ashamed of old work is the point. If we don’t look back on our work and see the faults or feel embarrassed by them, then maybe we haven’t learned anything by doing that work. And really, in the end, isn’t that the whole point of this art journey – to learn with every attempt and apply those lessons to the next work? The treacherous and wonderful thing about it is that it’s an infinite game – we play to play, not to win, because tomorrow-Matt will always be a slightly better artist than yesterday’s one. All I have to do is keep making the work.

I love the Hilda graphic novels by Luke Pearson. The drawing style, the colour palette, the layouts, and the writing all work together so beautifully to create a gorgeous and engaging narrative. When I’m in the mood for pure pleasure-reading, I’ll often pick up a Hilda, never mind I’ve read each book over 10 times already, and find something new to discover, or something to linger over a little longer than before. It, to me, is a beacon; an example of what’s possible if I just worked a little harder. The curious thing about Hilda is that it’s so good it destroys my ability to create.

Maybe it’s because it shows me how far I’ve got to go with my skills in visual storytelling. It certainly increases my sense of imposter syndrome as a visual artist. It makes anything I’ve made, in comparison, look like an amateur did it. It ignites all the guilt I feel for not having gone to art school. It, in so many ways, is terrible inspiration. I love Hilda, but I never read it before I’m about to do some illustration work. It makes me seize up and takes a good day or so to recover.

Calvin and Hobbes, on the other hand, is a different story.

I love Calvin and Hobbes just as much as Hilda. It’s one of my go-to pleasure reads – over and over and over again. Like Hilda, the colour palettes, the layouts, the writing in Calvin & Hobbes all work together so perfectly that it’s another beacon of what’s possible if I just worked a bit harder. The curious thing about Calvin & Hobbes is that, for all its similarities to Hilda, it has the opposite effect on my motivation to work. After about an hour of leafing through my collection of Calvin and Hobbes, my hands get itchy for a brush. I can’t help but sketch out a few ideas I’ve made but have been too lazy to put to page. I look for an old sketch that I can spend time colouring. With Hilda, I stop making, with Calvin, I start again.

I don’t really know why any of this is. It’s not like Bill’s masterwork is any more achievable for me than Hilda. I’m still the same, clunky illustrator reading either one. I know that reading Hilda is making me a better writer and artist. And I know that Calvin and Hobbes is doing the same. As they say, to be the best, read the best. What they don’t say, however, is to spend time understanding what effect these brilliant works have on you and adapt your work habits to take advantage of them. The opposite could be catastrophic to your ability to create. And that’s the last thing any artist needs.

There are two ways to approach a person with whom we disagree, dislike, or with whom we’re storming.

The first way is to assume they’re stupid, or dumb, or toxic, or all of the above. In this mode, the easiest and most productive course of action is to walk away because, with this view, it’s the other who has to change, not us. No one enjoys being around people they detest, and life’s too short to live it in conflict. After all, there are plenty of other people in the world to spend time with who will agree with us on anything, and everything we think is true.

The second way is to assume that everyone is just doing their best. That everyone we interact with has had their own unique and diverse set of experiences that have shaped their values, their view of the world, and the relationships that they form. It requires us to believe that most people are not inherently stupid, dumb, or toxic, but that we learn behaviours based on our experiences. It requires open-mindedness and curiosity to seek the context of each other’s existence so that we can understand where the other is coming from and why. It’s only through understanding this that we can seek to change the only thing that’s under our control – our own behaviour – so that we can form relationships that are positive and beneficial for ourselves and others, no matter who the other is.

Any business, product, or service, no matter if it’s a global corporation or a sole-trading illustration freelancer, needs to solve one or more problems for someone else to keep trading. After all, that the thing that people pay for – the removal of their problems. Uber solves the problem of finding a ride home. Airbnb solves the problem of finding accommodation. Panadol solves the problem of a headache. But what problem is an illustrator solving?

At the most basic level, an illustrator may be solving an aesthetic need. Maybe a publisher or commissioner of work needs a very specific style to complement some text or create a certain mood in a public space or publication. In this case, style (and medium) is pretty important. But how does a publisher choose between two or more artists’ work whose style may create the same (or similar) mood? Maybe the commissioner has a few other problems to solve?

No one likes to work with people who make their lives harder than they need to be. After all, work can be tiring and stressful, even at the best of times. So maybe the way to differentiate is to be looking at other problems that people in publishing have. Most editors I’ve worked with juggle many books at a time, all of them on their own high-pressure deadline. Trying to keep track of things is difficult. Can an artist differentiate themselves beyond their work to help make that problem go away? What if emails were written clearly? What if expectations were set well in advance? What if things were consistently delivered on or ahead of time? What if it was easy to share progress at sales meetings? What if it was easy to print the work out when it needed to be? What if we saw art direction as a way to learn and grow rather than a controlling overlord? What if we were more transparent in our practice?

When one looks more deeply at the lives of the people we collaborate within the business of illustration, we find there are a wealth of problems to solve beyond creating the final artwork to fill an aesthetic need. Maybe the work isn’t just in creating the art, but helping the people who commission it to have a stress-free, enjoyable, and collaborative experience along the way.

Imagine the ego required to put your crap art out into the world and pretend it’s amazing as if it’s something people should notice, or care about, or the audacity of the artist to assume that someone should love it? Imagine the ego required to talk it up – to say “I made this, I think it’s excellent!” We tend to associate that sort of ego with the brash, confident, brazen artist.

But, that very same egocentricity is responsible for the opposite effect, too. We don’t often associate egocentricity with the shy, introverted maker. But, imagine being so egocentric to think that anyone would notice or would even care about your work so much that you would be embarrassed by their reaction. To think so much of yourself that you would even get a reaction at all? When people have so much stuff to draw their attention in a world hellbent on content creation, it’s pretty egocentric to hold back your work from the public eye for fear of some sort of large-scale social media-driven embarrassment. Isn’t it? What’s so special about you?

What this means is that we have two options. We can use our ego to hide from the world. We can work in private and never share what we make for fear of being noticed. Or, we can use our ego to engage with the world and share the work we make. If it’s true that, chances are, no will care anyway, then we’ve got nothing to lose. And if someone does happen to notice, then you made something that matters. You can learn from that and put it into your next work. Maybe that’s the point after all?

Being a child of the mid-80s, I was born in the midst of 30 years of consistent economic growth. At that time, and for the next 30 years, market conditions were predictable. As I was growing up, I was told that I could be anything – the world’s my oyster, reach for the stars, I’m in control of my own destiny. I thought I knew the rules. If I eat well, exercise, manage money carefully and put effort into maintaining positive relationships with family and friends, life would be fairly predictable and manageable, maybe even happy. And then something unexpected happens; my body went haywire. Even though I did all the things I was supposed to do to ‘keep it under control’, it flipped my world completely and brought into sharp relief how little control I have over my own life, even my own body.

Almost 2000 years ago, Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it like this:

“Some things are within our power, while others are not. Within our power are opinion, motivation, desire, aversion and, in a word, whatever is of our own doing; not within our power are our body, our property, reputation, office, and, in a word, whatever is not of our own doing.”

What does this mean in plain English? Well, it means there’s a very small set of things that we absolutely control and a very large set of things that we don’t.

Up until the point of my health scare, I had considered myself a pretty healthy individual. I’d exercise, eat well, do all the things that I was told would keep me healthy, and it was all based on science. But, as it turns out, those things that we’re told lead to outcomes of certainty are far from the truth. Those activities may influence an outcome, they don’t control it. Realising this was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn, but it has been transformative to all parts of my life – especially amidst a global pandemic in 2020.

When we accept that we can only influence and not control large parts of our life, it helps us focus on the agency we have as individuals and be OK when everything else ‘doesn’t go according to plan.’ Yes, I want good relationships with my friends and family, and I can do my best to make those things happen, but in the end, if someone doesn’t like me, it’s not my fault, it’s just out of my control because they themselves have lives and influences that I cannot shape.

Watercolour, funnily enough, is also a master teacher when it comes to the difference between influence and control. What one realises is that attempting to control watercolour fully is arduous work and it produces uninspiring and generally un-emotional work. But giving the medium space to run, bloom and settle on the paper with influence in just the right areas, at just the right time from the artist is when watercolour is at its best. It turns out; it’s also true of life.

The things we own, and the labour we practice so that we can own those things, can be measured across three fundamental domains of value: Use, Exchange, and Symbol/Sentiment.

1. Value of use: is when we derive benefit from the use of an object. i.e. Hammers have high use value because they help us nail things into other things in the way that other objects cannot.
2. Value of exchange: is when we derive benefit from the sale of an object. i.e. we own vintage cars in the hope that one day, we can sell them for more.
3. Value of symbol or sentiment: is when we derive benefit from the way an object makes us feel or what it says about us in society. e.g. The fashion brands we purchase are a way that many people communicate to the rest of the world about how much money they have or what sort of person they are.

Not all labour or objects have equal value across these domains, and nor should they. It’s unlikely that I will be able to sell a toothpick I just used for any more than I bought it for, but it has a high value of use for cleaning my teeth after a meal. If, however, that toothpick was George Clooney’s, the exchange *and* symbolic value is likely to be much higher.

Likewise, the same applies to labour. A nurse has incredibly high use-value because of the important function and service they perform for society, but in relative terms, they aren’t paid much and so the exchange value of that labour is relatively low.

It’s also important to recognise that objects or labour don’t have inherent or fixed value either. 20 years ago, practising law had high exchange value, but it’s now almost on par (and maybe in decline) compared to software engineering. The exchange value of books has decreased substantially as the world found other ways to share information. Interestingly, rare books are only increasing in exchange value by virtue of their scarcity.

Applying this knowledge in decision-making

Knowing these domains of value help me think more deeply about my habits of consumption and labour. They don’t inherently make things morally good or bad, but they’re just a framework to sense-check why I’m buying or not buying something, or why I’m spending my time working on this thing and not that thing.

In the case of the labour of my art practice: It has incredibly high use-value for me; it helps me sort out the tangle of emotions and thoughts that knot up over time if I don’t tend to them through writing or drawing. The output of that labour has, comparatively to my day job, very little exchange value. Yes, I make books, but designing and building software is a far superior way to spend time if what I want to optimize is the exchange of money and time. Symbolic value is an interesting one. My art practice has evolved my identity, there’s no doubt about it, even though it took about 5 years of almost daily practice to begin to feel comfortable with calling myself an ‘artist’. But it’s not the primary reason I practice art. My aim is not to be a well-known artist, it never has been. But, I fully expect that the emphasis on these domains will shift and change over time. Maybe when I’m rich and famous (lol), those paintings that I’ve created will garner higher exchange value than they do now?

Domains of value are also useful when thinking about the purchasing of art for myself. The art I acquire has very high symbolic-value. I’d be lying if I didn’t say there is pride and prestige for me in acquiring the art I love and showing it off to people when they visit. The collection and display of objects as a way to reinforce our identity is deeply human after all. But, the art I choose to hang in my home also has very high use-value. It’s on my wall, I look at it every day. It reminds me of who I am, and what I aspire to be. Right now, my art purchasing decisions aren’t based on exchange value at all. Some will say that’s a mistake, but that’s only because exchange value is a higher priority for them; which, of course, has it’s own inherent symbolic value.

The domains of value that I emphasise in my life has changed and will continue to change over time. In my younger days when I had little money, exchange-value was more important – how little time could I spend working for the most amount of money? Right now, it’s a use or symbolic value that I see as more important. However it might change in the future, this model of value will be a nice way to check-in with myself and help me understand what I buy, how I spend my time, and why.