When I think about what painters should paint, a few things come to mind immediately: flowers (or still lifes), vast landscapes (i.e. mountains, rivers, lakes, valleys), & portraiture. It should be in a semi-recognisable ‘style’, fairly representational (i.e. look like the thing it’s supposed to be), and beautiful. To me, those things are what comprise a ‘painting’.

Or are they?

What about the ordinary things that others don’t notice because they’re part of the everyday – malls, hardware shops, rubbish on the side of the road, a homeless person. Are these the sorts of things painters should paint? Would they sell if they were painted? If they didn’t sell, does that mean they are bad paintings?

What about photography? What should people take photos of?

I’ve recently discovered The New Topographics – a photographic movement of the late 60s and early 70s in America where photographers started taking pictures of the unextraordinary – and, I mean, the really unextraordinary. When we look at these photos in today’s image-saturated culture, it’s easy to think, “What’s the big deal? People can take photos of whatever they want?” But, at the time, these were photos of things people thought you shouldn’t take photos of.

What the photographic artists were doing, of course, were creating images they thought were important – reflecting on the sprawl of human habitation into places that humans had not been before. But to people ‘used to’ looking at ‘photographs’, these images could be described as banal, unphotographic, and ordinary.

Similar leaps into the unextraordinary also happened in Japan at similar times – photographers like Daido Moriyama and Toshio Shibata were making photographs that no one in Japan had seen before: prostitutes and industrial infrastructure. Capturing these images was not what photography was for, but they did it anyway. They caused a stir.

In both of these cases, these Japanese and American photographers moved photography on. As one expert described – they gave us permission to take photographs of new and different things.

And so, when I look at what’s going on in Children’s Literature, I can’t help but think, what should an illustrator illustrate? Happy children interacting with happy animals? Bears in bow ties, elephants wearing pyjamas? What about diversity – able-bodied kids of colour? Same-sex parents? What’s too far? What are we not ready for?

What we’re not supposed to draw are children with missing limbs. Children who may be improvising their way through life with low vision or blindess. Children dealing with chronic illness. Children interacting in the ‘real’ world – a world of climate change and natural disasters, rising homelessness and inequality, a world of prejudice, bias, and one where where humans and robots co-exist. A world as it exists, with all it’s messiness, joy, sadness, happiness, excitement and despair.

But what if we did? I’m not sure anyone would buy it, but would it do what The New Topographics did for photography? Would it move us on? Would it give us permission to draw things that have not been drawn before? Maybe it’s worth a try.

Some people prefer crunchy peanut butter, other people prefer smooth. It’s not that one is better than the other, they’re just different. And, no matter how compelling-a-case I could put together for why crunchy is better, I will never win over devotees of the smooth variety.

Same goes for art. While some types/styles of art may appeal to a bigger audience than others, there will always be a smaller audience for a type of art – some like crunchy, some like smooth.

So, when we’re judging ourselves and our work based on quantitative metrics like how many sales, how many followers, how many likes, and so on, we’re looking at the wrong metrics. If you’re trying to sell smooth peanut butter to crunchy fanatics (and no one is buying it), it easy to think your smooth recipe sucks rather than what’s really going on, you just haven’t found your people, yet.

Whenever I hear people in publishing talk about inspiration, it’s always about books. “I loved them as a child”, “they saved me”, “I can’t live in a world without books”. So, what does it mean for someone like me who didn’t ‘grow up with books’?

As someone who isn’t natively a ‘book person’, it can be difficult to fit in. “What was your favourite book growing up?” is a question that comes up a lot at conferences and the like. And, whilst I fallback on things I do remember (like Mr Men, or Grug) they are very fallbacks because my favourite stories came from movies – Indiana Jones, The Goonies, Back to the Future, and especially Neverending Story (yes yes, I know it’s a book). But, no one ever asks about them. In fact, they’ve even cut them out of interviews and say things like, ‘because our readers like books’.

Writing (and words), have always seemed intellectually superior to me, whereas drawing has always felt ‘basic.’ People talk about the “great novels” but, at least in the circles I grew up with, people never really talked about the “great comics.” It’s enough to make one feel as though you’re not a real writer until you can write with words.

But, as I’m growing into a version of myself that’s becoming more certain about who I am, I’ve realised that some of the best writing happens with pictures – we just don’t notice it as ‘writing’.

There’s probably some scientific reason why images and words are perceived differently to one another – the latter requiring more ‘effort’ and therefore being more ‘cerebral’ than the other. But, what I know is that images are, quite truly, a universal language. They work on a different plane to words – they provoke emotion and communicate messages far more efficiently than words. One only needs to look to our accelerating, globalised culture for evidence of this. And, in a world that is seeking faster and more efficient, pictures win.

Both words and images are simply abstract marks on a surface; that surface might be a page, a piece of light-sensitive film, or even a cave wall 20,000 years ago. Making any of those marks is fundamentally human and so, instead of focusing on words or pictures, maybe it’s about words and pictures – whatever it takes to think better and tell a good story; the ultimate human act.

A few months ago, I decided to start exploring film photography. I bought myself a vintage 35mm film camera, a few rolls of film, watched loads of YouTube tutorials about how cameras work – the exposure triangle and so on – and read lots of books. Then, I just started taking photographs.

In the process of taking those photographs, I wasn’t thinking about what I’d do with them. I was focussed on understanding the technical skills of using my camera, reading light, exposing well, and being increasingly aware and sensitive to what was in my frame before I pressed the shutter button. I simply took photos of things that interested me. With every 36 shots, I reloaded a film canister and started over.

A week or so ago, I finally received scans of 6 months of photographs. There were, as expected, some I really liked and some I completely stuffed up. But, what emerged from these 180 or so individual frames was a pattern – I seemed to enjoy taking quiet photos of people and nature.

Seeing those photographs gave me an idea: human – nature; a photographic art project exploring the main thing I’ve been thinking about, subconsciously and consciously for the last few years: humanity’s dependence on and relationship with nature.

When I picked up my camera, I wasn’t thinking about this project as an output, I was simply interested in learning about how to take photos, what photography might be for, and whether I’d enjoy it. (And, as it turns out, I really love it). But, what’s more interesting to me is that what happened with the camera already happens with my drawing practice; the meaning of the work evolves from doing and seeing the work, first.

In my drawing practice, I sit down with a pencil and paper and just start making marks. It’s in the process of viewing those marks that ideas about what I want to draw emerge. In my photography practice, it’s the same. I simply take photos for the experience of taking photos and, in viewing the final images (sometimes, months later), see things that I never saw before. Seeing those things give ideas to explore further. And that, in turn, feeds the physical act of making photographs.

There are many people I know who are intimidated by the blank page – I don’t know what to draw, I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to make a picture of – but I’ve learned, in several mediums now, that the only way to know those things is by engaging in the act, first, no matter how ‘aimless’ it seems to begin with.

There’s a difference between doing something for your livelihood and doing it for your humanhood.

Livelihood requires trading your labour for money. Illustrating for your livelihood often involves drawing for someone else’s need. Illustrations for an annual report, a corporate animation, an advertising campaign, a magazine editorial, a complement to a cook book. There’s nothing wrong with this, and it can be fun, but, in the end, it’s about providing yourself with food, shelter, and warmth.

Humanhood is something different. Humanhood is about trading your labour for something that isn’t money – a better understanding of yourself and your place in the world. Because you’re not solving someone else’s problem, almost* no one will pay you for developing your humanhood. Drawing for your humanhood is an investment in yourself.

Sometimes, the work we do for our humanhood changes what we’re able to sell for our livelihood. For example: Maybe, in private, we explore new materials, or a new way of drawing; the sort of artistic evolution that results in some new and surprising work we’ve never done before. That work can be ‘marketed and sold’ to a buyer looking for that sort of thing. But, as soon as the contract for the work is signed, even though it came from the work we did to develop humanhood, is, in the end, solving someone else’s need – that’s why they’re paying us. Same goes for the art and design of picture books, by the way.

It’d be great if the work we did to develop our humanhood was purchased by someone, consistently enough, to provide ourselves with a livelihood, but that’s almost* never the case. But, once we’re able to differentiate between the two modes and maintain an honesty with ourselves about who we’re working for at any given time, we’re able to do both, even better than before.

*almost – it’s worth noting that there are exceptions to every rule and there are cases where anything is possible.

There are hundreds of books (and millions of YouTube videos) about art-making. From the philosophical position – why do we make it – to the concrete instruction – here’s how you paint it. The world is saturated with advice, guidance and instruction on how to make art or ‘be an artist’. It’s easy to think – what could I possibly contribute to this?

There are also, by now, probably billions of drawings of koalas, teddy bears, fire engines, hammers, parents, children, racoons, foxes, ice-cream, and all the things that typically end up in children’s books. Do we really need another version of any of those things? Someone’s already done it, so why bother?

But, perhaps the reason to bother is that people perceive the world in more than a billion ways and so the chances are pretty high that your take on how to paint light, or why you make art in the first place, will find a kindred soul or two and start a fire in them to do the same. Maybe your take on a koala will be the one that finds a small heart, somewhere in the world who says, “I like your koala better than every koala that’s come before.”

I’ve been writing on this journal once a week for 3 years. I’m pretty sure I haven’t had an insight into the art experience that hasn’t been written about before by at least one other soul in the history of human existence. Why do I bother? Well, first and foremost, writing helps me think and learn, so, on one level, I do it for myself. But, the reason its public is that maybe my take matters to someone out there, like a message in a bottle floating in vast viridian ocean. Maybe it washes up on the right beach, at the right time, when someone’s got a moment to notice.

If they don’t? That’s OK, writing those messages into the ether is still useful to me.

What if illustration was a secondary career, not the primary one? What if you didn’t have to rely on drawing to put food on the table? What if, like me, the illustration work and the ‘day job’ could co-exist and, in fact, improve one another?

Golf, animation, design

When I was 16, I had to make a decision – to pursue professional golf (yes, I was a good golfer) or go to university and study something completely different. I chose the latter. Not from fear, but because I enjoyed the game of golf too much. I couldn’t imagine ever enjoying being in a position where a 3ft putt would decide whether I could eat that week. That sounded (and still sounds) terrifying.

My other interest was animation. In fact, I thought I wanted to be an animator. Pixar and Dreamworks were just hitting the stage at the time, so I picked a uni course that opened that possibility. But, I tried 3D animation for 3 weeks in the first semester and realised how it just wasn’t for me. Too fiddly, too technical, too… disconnected from the fluency of what drawing was for me, even though I didn’t really do it much in high school, anyway.

But, what I discovered at University was Design. Design as a practice. How it applied to architecture, objects, & software. That there were people and decisions behind the spaces we inhabit and the everyday tools we use. Before then, I never really thought about that, but since then, it’s almost all I’ve thought about.

I began a career in Design almost 20 years ago. I left the idea of drawing or animation behind in high school. I would be a designer. It blended the appreciation I had for aesthetics with the enjoyment I got from making tools for people.

I worked as a Designer for 15 years. Mostly making software products that paid (and continue to pay) surprisingly well. On the most part, I enjoyed the work but found myself burning out in front of screens (I was staring at a lot of them, most of the day).

As an escape, I picked up a pencil and piece of paper for the first time in 15 years, and just drew things. For me. It was meditative, imaginative, and it re-ignited the storyteller spark in me. Because of my Design career I had enough money to buy nice materials and try many different things.

And then, a funny thing happened – I was ‘discovered’ on Instagram and offered an illustration project; in fact, 3 books… at once.

It doesn’t have to be a binary choice

Now, 8 years after that moment, I’ve got 20+ books in market and a continuing career in Design. They work together and activate different parts of my complex self. I hear illustrators who say, ‘but I can’t do anything else but draw.’ I wonder what the chances really are of that, given humans are such complex beings. Perhaps those illustrators are just more afraid of ‘letting illustration go’. As if you either are or aren’t an illustrator. But, it’s not a binary choice. It can be an ‘and’ not just an or. I’m living proof of it.

For me, the Design work I do activates the logical, deductive, and scientfic part of my brain. It forces me into situations with people that, left to my own devices, I’d probably normally avoid. But, the flipside of being in these uncomfortable situations is that I’m gaining different perspectives on how others go through the world – that’s critical to evolving my picture book work.

The illustration work I do activates the inner introvert in me – it is quiet, meditative, and isolating. The interesting thing about this mix of Design and Illustration is that they both share the most fun bit – lateral thinking and imagination. Once I’m exhausted from collaborating with others in Design work, I get to spend time alone drawing things.

Design and Illustration also work together to help me manage financial goals. I don’t need to illustrate a book to put food on the table, which means I can pick and choose the illustration projects that appeal to me emotionally. I know that, because of this, I also produce better and more authentic work, which, once again, feeds itself with more projects I like to do because it’s the authenticity that sells.

I can’t imagine how much pressure one would be under to make illustration the primary income stream, not just for oneself, but also supporting a family. It changes everything.

If it’s your primary income source, then when things are lean you may need to draw things you don’t feel like drawing which, in turn, creates illustration that you may not be authentically proud of. But, what inevitably happens is the work you do is the work you get so those illustrations become your body of work and people then believe ‘that’s the work you do’, so they ask you to do more of it. Unless you’ve got personal projects on the side to help direct a folio towards somewhere you want it to go (which is just extra, unpaid work anyway), you end up cornered.

From a financial perspective, the way people buy illustration is incompatible with the way bills come in. Bills are regular – like waves at the ocean. Project-based income is not; it’s lumpy. There are some periods of abundance and periods of scarcity. One might say, “save some of the abundance for times of scarcity, like a squirrel stores nuts”, but, with illustration, there’s no guarantee that another nut is coming at all. Or, at the very least, it’s not in the illustrators control, no matter how much ‘marketing’ or ‘self-promotion’ you’re able to do. That sounds incredibly stressful.

I’ve experienced freedom by committing to illustration work as a secondary income stream, and along with finding a primary one that doesn’t drain my creative energy, I’ve found it’s possible to have both. Maybe there are others out there who may find the same thing?

The other day I posted 7 still images and a synopsis of a personal project I’d been working on called “Colour Hunter”. I did it mostly to demonstrate to other emerging artists that I take my own advice – work on stuff that matters to you without thinking about what a publisher might think. By working in this way, one ends up producing work they like and are proud of and it’s not judged by the ‘success’ of a publishing contract or not.

As it turns out, those 7 still images attracted 5 different publishers seeking to ‘work together on this’. It was never meant for that, but that’s what happened.

The problem with marketing art

We’re living in a time when marketing art is difficult; where obscurity, not piracy, is more of a threat to an artist’s livelihood. The primary channels of getting our work out there, at the time of writing this, are owned and supplied by large tech companies – TikTok and Instagram (via Facebook) – and they have a stronghold on the world’s attention through things like the network effect.

The goal of companies like Instagram and TikTok is engagement – more eyeballs for longer periods of time so that they can charge a higher premium for advertisers to advertise to us. We could moralise over that model for years but the bigger problem for artists is that, what Instagram wants, it will get. Do what we need or your work won’t get seen.

At least, that’s the threat.

There is currently huge pressure on artists to play Instagram’s game. Short form video content is proving a pathway to higher engagement for those platforms (and by engagement, I mean attention, not active likes, clicks and so on). But what does it mean to be a person that produces still images, then?

I’ve seen painters dancing in front of their canvas. I’ve seen illustrators uploading ‘videos’ of a single unmoving image in the hope that Instagram will see it as something they want – short form video content – without having to become a video producer as well as an illustrator. I’ve seen ‘book unboxings’ by authors – another cheap and easy pathway to short form video content without doing too much work outside of their comfort zone.

I’ve felt the pressure, too. I could make videos about how I make art, how others make art; timelapses, instructionals, and podcasts are all possible. But, you know what, for every timelapse I set up, for every video I produce, for every podcast I participate in, I lose time for doing what I want to do – explore the power of the still image.

Some people will say that I’m not like them. That I’m already ‘discovered’. That people are already watching. And yes, that’s true. With 20+ picture books under my belt I’m becoming more a of ‘known quantity’. But my career began 8 years ago with a few still images. 8 years later, 7 still images piqued interest again.

Every artist will have a different appetite for how much proverbial dancing in the front of the canvas they want to do. But, unless you have made the work before you make the marketing, no amount of singing and dancing will grow a career, or, more importantly, an inner life of the artist. Isn’t chasing interior peace in one’s own mind and body the reason we create art in the first place?

Sure, it’s nice to feel seen, but feeling seen is now the business model underlying TikTok and Instagram so it becomes unhealthy for someone trying to explore what they think, in private, most of the time. Perhaps if we did less dancing and more painting or drawing, the work will improve so much that it will speak for itself. Maybe everything else is a distraction?

Among all the reasons for writing, the most important one for me is that I write to think. If I don’t write – this journal, that story – it’s not long before my brain becomes a muddled mess of half-formed, incomplete ideas.

I draw to think, too – either on a whiteboard or in a sketchbook – the physical act of movement, of responding to what emerges on the page that wasn’t there before is critical in helping shape what I see, how I feel, and how I might make others feel.

Many non-writers or drawers assume that artists and writers don’t put pencil to paper or fingers to keyboard until we have the idea. That we wait for ‘divine inspiration to strike, a spirit moving through us or a clear mind image of what needs to appear on paper. The truth is, the idea or the images emerge *through the act*. The best thing about this is that there’s only one way to prove this is true, and you don’t have to have the idea to begin with – just pick up a pencil, or open the text editor, and start.

I’ve recently discovered that every time I’ve changed jobs (about 5 times in my career), I’ve bought a new pair of nice shoes. At the time, I tell myself I need them for the job. Sneakers for the less corporate times, brogues for the times I need to dress up like when I’m consulting to government, boots for when I’m ‘on farm’ with landholders.

I’ve learned, over the years, that how I dress matters. Not just to those who meet me for the first time, like in a new job, but to how I behave when I’m wearing what I wear. If I put on a suit (a rare occasion for me), I stand taller. If I wear my ‘usual’ clothes (cardigan and sneakers), I feel more relaxed.

What does that mean for dressing while art making? Well, I never bought new shoes when I got my first contract – or ever even thought about it? I know that, for practicality, it would be better to wear ‘junk’ clothes; clothes I’d be OK getting paint on.

But, when I dress ‘like a bum’, I feel like one, and when I feel like one, I’m not in a great space for making work. So, instead of new shoes, I bought an apron. And not some crappy plastic kitchen one, it’s a nice apron. When I wear this apron, I feel like an artist. I feel like I can make things I’ve never made before. I feel like I’m part of a longer story of artists throughout the ages; I’m doing something important.

And, whilst I know that feeling a particular way doesn’t make it true, there is research to suggest that what we wear matters. I’d never encourage anyone to buy something when they can make do with what they’ve got but perhaps, occassionally, we can treat ourselves to some new shoes, just to see where we’ll go?