Studio Diary

I've been spending a lot of time in the studio this week working in complete silence and I couldn't stop thinking about AI. Specifically the conflict between people advocating for it and people raising awareness around the wider implications, and as I took a step back something became really clear to me.

‍

Everything about AI seems to be about speed, doing things faster, producing more, removing friction.

‍

But being in here working slowly day after day felt like the complete opposite of that and I realised that as a creative, speed isn't always a good thing.

‍

When life gets so overwhelming, having one physical task to focus on for hours, in silence, provides relief, and allows space to process my thoughts & emotions. None of that is enhanced by working faster or optimising every damn task.

‍

When I'm painting the point isn't to finish. If anything the longer something takes the more value it tends to have.

‍

As more things become easier to outsource I'm becoming more deliberate about what I want to keep to myself, the things that only I, with my specific life experience, my taste, my flaws, my obsessions, could make. Why would I hand that over to any technology regardless of the benefits.

‍

I believe that not everything needs to be optimised. Some things are valuable because they take time and attention.

This has been on my mind a lot this week in the studio. The infinite game goes against everything we've been taught, to optimise, set goals, win. But life doesn't work like that and the more I've tried to play it that way the worse it's gone.

‍

The idea comes from Simon Sinek but the philosophy is much older, stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, all pointing to the same thing which is that attachment to outcomes is one of the main sources of suffering and the real mastery comes from embracing the process.

The goal isn't to win, it's to keep playing.

‍

Outcome focus has made my life worse in three specific ways. It made me blind to what was already working. It stopped me enjoying the process, something I've noticed a lot with this YouTube series where watching myself improve week on week is far more satisfying than chasing any specific goal. And it fed this waiting for a miracle mentality, something to go viral and skip straight to the outcome.

‍

The real breakthroughs are never that dramatic, they're just the result of doing what you can with what you have - repeatedly, over a long time.

‍

Underneath all of it is something I fundamentally believe, that the purpose of life isn't to be happy, it's to become the alchemist of your own consciousness. That's the infinite game.

I spent two days working in complete silence this week. For the first five hours my brain felt like someone flicking between TV channels, noise, conversations, drama, all of it happening without my participation.

Around the five hour mark something shifted and I dropped into this deep flow state that I hadn't been in for a while.

‍

I've been working on this piece for about a month, spending all my spare time on it and putting most of my saved money into the gold and materials, which is a significantly bigger commitment than anything I've done before.

So sitting in that silence I had to actually face myself and ask whether I deeply believe in what I'm making enough for that investment to feel like a no-brainer. It was uncomfortable and I didn't want to brush it off. But it kept bringing me back to the concept, the imagery, the vision.

Ultimately, the answer for me was yes, completely. The obsession I feel when I'm working on this new body of work is the sign I'm on the right track.

‍

The other thing that came up in that quiet was clarity on some other projects I'd been turning over, decisions I thought I needed expert advice on. The answers just came on their own once everything else went quiet.

A few months ago I did this exercise where I imagined having more money than I could possibly spend and asked myself what I'd actually do with my time.

After the house, the cars, the trips, I landed on a random Tuesday morning with nowhere to be and the answer was simple: studio, nature, the people I love, and a lot of quiet time to create & process my inner world.

‍

The thing that shifted everything was realising that most of the feelings I associated with that imagined life were already available to me now. I was listening to a lot of Joe Dispenza at the time and the part that stuck wasn't about manifesting some future outcome, it was about how much of your dream life's emotional reality you can bring into your everyday right now.

‍

So I stopped fixating on everything in the way and started paying attention to how much space I already had.

This is a thought that's been rattling around in the back of my mind for the past couple of years and recently, with everything going on, it's been getting louder. I was in the studio this week turning it over and I realised it actually breaks down into three separate beliefs that keep trying to pull me out of a creative flow, so I wanted to talk through them and the things I have to keep reminding myself of to stay in it.

‍

The first one is guilt.‍

That feeling of being in a quiet studio making things while there's so much suffering happening elsewhere, like somehow that's self-indulgent. Whenever I catch myself hovering around that I have to drop it immediately because guilt is, as someone once put it, a landfill emotion. It's poison and I'm not interested in rationalising it or sitting with it. The truth I come back to is that we live in a multifaceted reality and there is never going to be a moment where only good things are happening in the world. Waiting for that moment to create doesn't make sense. And actually, creativity is the most significant contribution we can make right now, processing what's going on and sharing it.

‍

The second one is that feeling of being out of control.

For me that shows up as finding it hard to commit to projects or plan ahead because I don't know what the world is going to look like by the time the work is done. I had a pretty brutal experience with this during my first NFT launch where I spent five months building a solid body of work, had everything in place, and the week it went live the market crashed completely. That shook me more than I realised at the time and I think those feelings have been quietly bleeding into how I approach things since. The shift I've made is to focus on what actually happens inside me through the process, the resilience, the self-trust, the skills, because those are things I get to keep regardless of what the outcome does or doesn't do.

‍

The third one is more personal and something I've been working on for a while, this fear of bothering people.

Especially during launch periods when I'm more visible and putting work out into the world, there's this subconscious feeling that people have bigger things to deal with and here I am talking about art. What I keep coming back to is that all of that judgment is only happening in my own head and if anything the real problem is that people like me aren't taking up enough space. The people flooding the internet with fear and noise have zero hesitation about doing it and here we are, people who actually care deeply about what we're making, holding ourselves back from sharing things that are needed right now more than ever.

‍

So this week I'm leaning in. More time creating, more time thinking, more time making space for what feels good. If you've been feeling the same way, maybe this is the nudge to keep going.