I Never Really Thought of Myself as an Artist

I never really thought of myself as an artist. Not at first, anyway.

As a child, drawing was not a career plan or a carefully managed identity. It was monsters, vampires, fantasy beasts, zombies, comics, book covers, film posters, and the simple urge to copy the things that seemed exciting. I was trying to emulate people around me who could draw well, and trying to make my own versions of the images that grabbed me.

I wanted to make the stuff I loved looking at. That was enough. It did not need to mean anything more grand than that, and I certainly was not walking around with some polished idea of being an artist. I was a kid drawing the things I liked because drawing them was enjoyable.

In my mid-teens I did start to wonder whether art might become a job. Then life, in its usual helpful way, wandered off in several other directions. I became interested in television, film and media production. I worked on beaches overseas. Later I ended up in the IT industry during the internet boom. Then there was family, children, work, and the long practical business of being an adult.

Art did not disappear completely, but it thinned out into a trickle. I still made odd bits of work, but by my thirties I would not have called myself an artist. I was someone who had a hobby sometimes. There is a difference, at least emotionally, between making something now and again and feeling that making is part of who you are.

It came back later through therapy and mental health practice. At first, painting was not about a market or an audience. It was about regulation. It gave my ADHD and autistic brain somewhere useful to go, and it gave me a way to stop turning inward quite so destructively. The point was not to produce a body of work. The point was to have somewhere healthy to put attention.

Then I began making larger pieces, and some of them were good enough that I thought someone else might actually want them. Professional or not, selling or not, that changed the relationship. Calling myself an artist still feels slightly odd, but it is also useful. It gives a name to something that has become central again: making things, responding to images, working through colour, and trying to connect with people through the work itself.

I do not think art has to mean painting, or galleries, or the narrow conventional version of the word. Creativity is broader than that. Some programmers and mathematicians are artists in the way they think and make. For me, art is about creativity as a personal and cultural act: making something, adding something, and using it to connect with people. The medium matters, but not as much as the connection.

This is part of a short series drawn from a longer interview about making art, process, aphantasia, mental health practice, and finding a more honest way to share the work.