Art With Open Arms
It was a promising day. With the calendar taken care of for the week, I had a relaxed morning sorting the studio and a bit of admin. Then it was time for a micro-adventure. Up to London and the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration – my debut visit – to chair a discussion panel to open The Big Draw Festival. (Hear about this on episode 316 of The Creative Condition podcast or in The Creativity Diary) The night before I felt that tingle of anticipation. I would be getting to spend a night in a room full of my people, talking creativity and its power in the world. The next morning, I felt displaced. In the way the stress response does, there was no big reason for my sense of unease, the nervousness and sense of dread. It shadowed me on the dog walk and slunk around the edges of the studio as I used everything I’ve learned through anxiety to not make it the biggest thing in the room. This is my brain’s way of trying to protect me, just like a parent who can’t let their kid play out with friends without their watchful gaze because of the many what-ifs needling their subconscious, trying to help, but ultimately stifling the kid’s growth. This understanding helps me to work through the morning anxiety most days, sometimes in the first half an hour. But on this Friday, it got its claws in, and I struggled to pull them out.
Even this, I recognised, is not terminal, so I waited. I focused on my list and tolerated the discomfort. I got my fag-ash £1.89 coffee from Wetherspoons and enjoyed watching the blokes on the gambler, like I do, like non-anxious me would do. I made a phone call to a friend on the walk, and it was invigorating. But I felt tired and unsteady. On the train, I went over my notes for the discussion panel, then lost myself in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers audiobook. Even those gorgeous early scenes with Gollum in the 2nd half of the book couldn’t rid me of my low-level anxiety. So I blustered across London, on the tube and on foot until I arrived at the wonderful Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. It’s a beauty – tucked away in Angel, via a little snicket and a couple of great pubs – with a café, library, outside area and three brilliant exhibitions. I found Murugiah in the middle of his astounding solo show, ‘Ever Feel Like…’, giving a personal tour to a friend. Murugiah and I were due to record a podcast before The Big Draw launch, and I’d been giddy to see his show, given we’d shared three deep chats on the podcast over the last decade, serving me a small bit-part role in his story and progression from competent commercial illustrator to great artist doing his own thing with flair. But by this time, in my fragile state, I’d been ambushed by a London Underground advert about the cruelty of factory farming, and I was now close to spiralling into something worse than slight unease. I was hanging by a thread when I ran up the stairs and hugged Murugiah.
Then it happened.
I asked if I could piggyback on the personal tour, to which he readily agreed. He turned and began to walk slowly through the space, curated in a space shaped like an elongated U, taking us deep into his paintings, the struggles he too had faced in his life, how they fed the work with meaning, emotion and nuance. As I listened and experienced them up close and personal, studying the brushstrokes, the gigantic felt sculpture, the early digital pieces, seeking to understand the icons and deceptively cute character designs – who too, like the rest of us, could tell of both suffering and growth – the shadow parted. Almost in an instant. Again, in the way stress tends to do, it fucks off in the blink of an eye when purpose regains its colour. I belonged, and here together, with others who use art to navigate a world that is anything you want to call it, everything was OK.
By the time we headed off to record our podcast, my enthusiasm had returned, and it burned through the black cloud. I met Elisha, who had booked us for The Big Draw and we all smiled and laughed, sharing our varying levels of nerves about the event. I met Olivia and Brittany from the Quentin Blake Centre, and Murugiah and I were given a space in the back to record our fourth podcast chat, and it’s everything I’ve lived for since art school: my people, together, in a room. This too got deep, as it does, and I told him, there and then, that his work had pulled me out of a hole. It had shone its masterful colour on my shithouse of a brain, cascading around the same old neural pathways, too silly to stop and see the opportunities, the causes for cautious optimism most days.
And this is what art does. It forces us to step off for a second and breathe.
All of it was compounded by meeting Joey Yu and Greg Bunbury, our other panel guests, and getting to be in a room full of hope and essential human creativity. I remembered – not that I ever truly forgot – that we need this. Not just the proverbial us – the professionals and creative industry people – but humans. We all need a time and space for play, a vehicle through which to grind the ugly bits of life, like Play-Doh, through art and expression that transcends mere logic and linear things. To gamify, to write, to ponder, to sketch, to act out, to sculpt, to strum, to strategise on a sparkling board caked in nerd cards and dice, to throw balls, to hum, to run. Whatever. The method is secondary. But the human condition demands art, whatever shape that takes for you.