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8 hours ago
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Over the years from watching friends, one of the most important lessons I’ve learnt for anyone wanting to be an artist is this: don’t get a job. Failing that, don’t get a full time job. If you can’t do that: don’t get an intellectually taxing full time job.
But for the past year and a bit I’ve been working as a graphics engineer, first for a small startup and now for Figma.
I was a little burnt out as a self-employed artist. Not by making art, or engineering, or living on little money, but the relentless marketing and self-promotion needed to get any project moving. Applications. Social media posts. I have a lot to give to this world, but convincing people to care about my work is not it. As representations of work become more important, they start taking over the process. It becomes less a journey into the soul of the collective unconscious, and more of a rain dance for a rain god who has more customers than he has raindrops. I like dancing, but not like that.
Three years ago, for the opening of Cave of Sounds at the Milan Science Museum, I did a little artist interview for an Italian TV station. I’ve spent much time over the years trying to get a bit of coverage for works – to build connections, build a name (a “profile”), so I can get the resources to make more work, and an audience to see it. So when it comes to press, the immedite impulse is yes yes yes. Finally, somebody cares. But after we recorded, I was thinking that it hadn’t felt right. Why do I want to be on Italian TV? This is not my art. This is a subgoal of a plan for a plan for a plan to make some art. The means became its own end. They have a tendancy to do that.
So taking a job feels like something of a sabbatical. But I’m still making art. It’s actually been a busy year by my standards. In May, Cave of Sounds was invited to Macao for the international arts festival there. In July and August, Self Absorbed had its first propert showing at File Festival in São Paulo.
The sabbatical is from the artworld itself, or more, from self-promotion, or even more, from being invested in a specific professional outcome. It’s a sabbatical from reaching for things. From professional ambition. From feeling any obligation to relate my own work to that of the wider world. From feeling like I should be posting more on social media. From nursing abstract representations of myself.
Instead I’m following what’s actually enjoyable, in the limited time I have. It’s kind of working. Things are sparkling a bit more again. I’ve been taking photos (see above). Writing music. Rendering visuals and putting sound to them. Walking round cities with Adriana. We’re back in London. And here I am writing a newsletter again. I have so many ideas to share, many sitting half-written here. And the less any of it becomes embedded inside some kind of cohesive artistic narrative, the more they start to burn.
You know, I don’t want to be flippant about the privilege of employment. I know enough people who are struggling to find any paid work at all and the job I have is a very nice one. Good people, good pay, interesting work. But it does nonetheless confront me with a challenge to my identity. I keep getting flashbacks to that film Juno. The middle-aged husband making commercial jingles for a living who falls for the pregnant teenager whose unborn baby he and his wife plan to adopt. He decides to quit his steady work to try and make it again as a musician in a band, and we shake our head at his pathetic reach for a life that might nurture his soul, but which is long gone. I only saw the film one time 17 years ago while I was still at university, but I remember his sad character vividly. Something was close to the bone. A warning to prioritise my creative soul over the trappings of life, to take my dreams seriously.
But, of course, now there is little time, energy or brainspace to do any of these things. Writing is probably the most intimate work I put out. It has been hard as I reconcile who I am. But I think it is one of the most important things to sustain. The regular act of putting what I think and feel into words has a tendency to make me think and feel more of those. Publishing what I write, extra so. The more honest I can get the writing, the more I can be in touch with the stuff that powers everything.
Tim
London, 16 Oct 2025
