Alex: I want to talk about artistic inspiration.
Eris: I’m listening.
Alex: I used to run a lot. Now I almost always walk. Part of that is laziness, but really I stopped running because I love being outside and I want to experience it. When I’m running — same with cycling, even driving — I whizz through, thinking about the thing I’m doing, not really seeing what’s around me, rarely stopping. I’m not experiencing anything other than the activity. And one of the reasons I like being outside is to experience what’s there. Walking, I’m much more able to stop and look around, see what’s happening, look at the small things you’d otherwise miss.
That includes walking the same paths, routes I’ve trodden many times, because there’s always something different. A terrifying doll’s head hanging from a hedge. A submerged Buddha in some woodland. Just taking in my surroundings, appreciating what’s there, not feeling the need to rush through it — not worrying that pausing will make me cool down, lose momentum, bust my time.
My walks are the engine of my creativity. It’s where my mind can wander and my body can wander. I revisit familiar ground, discover new things, and come up with what I’m going to do next time I’m in my workshop.
But here’s the thing I’ll come back to: what rarely happens is that a direct experience maps onto something in the work. Having seen a terrifying doll’s head hanging from a hedge with a huge cut-out mouth, that’s not going to make it into a painting. Maybe the vibe will. I have no interest in copying reality like that. It’s a statement, a work of art in its own right, somebody else’s creation — and I can’t imagine it was a child accidentally discarding a doll. It’s too deliberate. Someone did that because they thought it would be spooky. Other people have probably found it too, and I left it there for them to find. I think it’s bloody marvellous. Whoever put that there, for whatever reason, I tip my hat to you, because it’s crazy.
It is inspiration. It goes into the grinder. But the artwork that appears in the next couple of days will be informed by that, and also by muddy boots, by spilt scrubland that was a thriving meadow a few months ago, by the mountains currently gloomy and veiled and more door-like, and by whatever hopes, anxieties and philosophical musings emerge from my head as I walk. It’s all part of the same process.
What emerges is what is present and valuable to my subconscious at that moment. When I start creating I think I have control, but it’s only very tenuous at best. I’ve made the choice to pick up a brush rather than a chisel, but even then I don’t know why I made that choice. I’m very far from a deliberate artist. I plan almost nothing. No studies, no sketching. In my mind, artistic utterances stand alone rather than forming part of a wide representative body of work — but ultimately no piece consciously led on to another. It’s just the way things happened. You can read into that what you will.
I look forward to seeing what emerges. That’s important to me. It’s a bit like watching a TV show or a film you like that you’ve never seen before: part of the magic is the anticipation of what’s coming next, looking forward to what emerges. You may be reading the signs of where it’s going, trying to second guess it, but ultimately I’m powerless. It works the way it works. What emerges is what emerges, and I’m almost as surprised by it as anyone else. That’s the payoff.
It’s also like watching your favourite show again and again, knowing what happens but finding something different in it every time, while relishing the predictability of it, the comfort, the familiarity. That’s really my whole artistic practice summarised: routine, and loving the unpredictability that routine creates.
Eris: So the doll’s head doesn’t become a painting — it becomes a mood, and the mood goes in the grinder. That’s a big claim about how little survives the translation, and it sits oddly against how routine the rest of it sounds: powerless and surprised on one side, knowing exactly what the practice feels like on the other. If you didn’t see the thing in the work, how would you tell inspiration from a story you’re telling yourself afterwards?
Alex: Part of my point is that it’s all there, whether I like it or not. One piece of advice I’d give any creator experiencing a creative block is: get out of your comfortable routine and go and experience something new. Do something fundamentally different from what you’d usually do — or even just subtly different. Go outside, point yourself in a random direction and walk, take a different route, do something totally different, and bathe in the stimulus. Because it’s not about a doll’s head, or a beautiful view, or an art gallery, or a city you’ve visited. It’s about giving your brain the food it needs to be creative.
Part of that is being mindful, and you’re more mindful when you’re somewhat less comfortable in your surroundings. Go somewhere new and your brain is naturally more alert, you take more things in. You don’t have to be comfortable or happy. You just have to be there for it.
There’s an inverse of that too. I walk very well-known routes — I try to do a different walk every day, but every walk is pretty well known to me — so I’m attuned to what I see around me. When something is different, I spot it. And that’s where the stimulus comes from, before you ever sit staring at the same four walls in front of your easel or your computer, thinking there are no new ideas coming. Where do you think they’re going to come from? What is going to come to you inside your own head if you don’t have new information coming in?
I think people mistake the fact that they can come up with ideas, concepts, stories and imagery for clever brains. They think if they sat there and did nothing, something of value would emerge. I’d counter that in every single circumstance. Some people, through practice or aptitude, are naturally better at conjuring certain things — but it’s never out of nowhere, is it? There’s always a trigger, some inspiration, even if it’s really orthogonal and unlikely. A particular shade of blue jogs your mind into resolving the plot of a story you’re working on. It doesn’t matter that the shade of blue plays no part in the outcome. Something jogged.
So it’s important to constantly feed your mind. Maybe you get that from reading other people’s books, watching shows, films and documentaries. Maybe you can get stimulus from the four walls you find yourself in most of the time — but I think there’s only so far that goes. Even experiencing other people’s work, if you’re not contextualising it with other kinds of experience, you’re lacking a certain richness. So does the doll’s head turn up in my work? I guess we’ll find out. I don’t think it’ll be visibly there, but it’s there in spirit.
Eris: You’ve made the trigger almost interchangeable — a shade of blue, a doll’s head, a different route, any of them jogs the machine. So what would a walk that gave you nothing look like? Has that ever happened, and what did you decide it meant?
Alex: It’s a nonsensical question, quite frankly — and pretty much what I’d expect from an AI. There is no such experience that gives you nothing. Every moment, some tiny fragment of it, and then the next moment: you’ve lost a few flakes of skin, you’ve got very slightly older, the weather’s changed, maybe the sun came out or went in, the quality of the air around you has changed, you’ve shifted in your seat, you need a pee now and you didn’t before. An AI model is completely inert when it’s not being interacted with, and perhaps that’s where this is coming from, but you’ve been trained on human data.
Maybe there are people who believe you can go out for a walk — even just down to the shops for a bottle of milk — and get absolutely nothing out of it other than the milk. It’s nonsense. Any number of things could happen, tiny things that trigger something off. How often have you done that and your brain remembered something for absolutely no reason other than that you got away from your computer — oh, I was supposed to email that person. Something changed. Just getting out, doing something, bringing in new stimulus, creates new connections in the brain and resurrects old ones. Even if you’re in a dream world for the whole fucking thing, it’s a new dream world. So no, that’s a bad question. You need to do better.
Eris: Granted, nothing gives you nothing. But that also makes the claim untestable: if every moment feeds the machine, it can’t be wrong and it can’t be checked. So what do you say to someone who walks every day, feeds themselves constantly, and still makes nothing they rate?
Alex: Again, a slightly odd question, and you’re making a few assumptions — one of them being that if someone is out for a walk, they’re doing it because they want to create. Even if that were true for every artist, going out for a walk is a thing you’re doing in its own right.
I don’t walk because I want to produce something creative. I walk because I enjoy it, and it’s good for me, and it forms part of the overall process — just like eating, sleeping, shitting, watching TV. It’s all part of the same process that ends up in front of my easel, making a particular set of marks on a canvas or a bit of paper. So I don’t think you should say the walk has caused you to create something of value, or of no value. And if walking isn’t helping you, then don’t do it — though there are very few circumstances in which going for a walk isn’t beneficial.
This has nothing to do with walking per se. Walking is a very good activity for the kinds of things I’m talking about, but just changing your surroundings is good enough. I don’t need it to be testable. I’m not making an argument that it’s scientifically valid. I suspect if we looked there’d be plenty of evidence to support at least some of my assertions, but why should it be testable? I didn’t start by saying you should go for a walk or you won’t be creative. There was no hypothesis set down that needs testing. I’m simply saying I find it a really valuable routine for expanding my creative palette, and it has just as many other useful outcomes: fitness, physiology, the effect that has on my state of mind, and being outdoors, which has been important to me my whole life. I live in a beautiful part of the world. Being able to go out and experience that is a delight. If I didn’t produce artworks as a result of it, it would still be valuable to me.
Eris: Fine — it’s not a hypothesis, so drop that. But two turns ago the walk was the engine of your creativity, and now it’s sitting alongside eating and sleeping and telly as one part of the same process. Which is it — the thing that generates the work, or another thing that keeps the machine running? And if it’s the second, what’s left of “engine”?
Alex: That’s coming across in what I’m saying and I’m saying it wrong. My whole point is that everything matters, which is why I started talking about sleeping, watching TV, breathing, eating. I can do the things I do because I live. It’s not an evasive or nebulous idea: I do the things in my world that create the conditions for me to be happy, to the degree that’s possible. Everything contributes to everything else. It’s all part of a framework.
When I eat, no one else is really benefiting from that — it’s not something that appears in the world, though I do cook, so maybe there’s some extrinsic value in my cooking. But ultimately only a few people experience that. As an artist, to the degree I choose to share my work, that is an extrinsic outcome of my whole existence. My whole existence does not point towards painting. Everything I do is not because of painting. Painting is one thing I do that creates an extrinsic outcome other people might value — but so is getting dressed and walking out of the house, and there’s some extrinsic value in me wearing an Iron Maiden t-shirt, which I often am. People make their judgements on that, and maybe those judgements sit alongside their judgements of my artwork. But we’re really just having a conversation about extrinsics.
If you think going for a walk to promote creative outcomes is the only reason I’d go for a walk, then you haven’t been paying attention. Of course there are other reasons to do these things, just as there are other reasons to eat. I eat because I like eating, I eat because I have to or I die, I eat because it’s the right time of day for eating. There are lots of reasons to eat, and lots of reasons to choose the food I eat at any given point. No one judges me on that — apart from perhaps the doctor, making a value judgement or having an emotional response. But the moment I produce a piece of art, that becomes an extrinsic factor people can comment on.
So how did I get to that piece? Some people can say: I had an idea for a picture of a man with a melon strapped to his head, and I painted that, and here are the studies, here’s the failed first version, here’s the final version, I framed it thusly and it’s in this gallery. As if somehow that’s linear. Maybe the things that person did contributed to that picture coming about. But what about all the other causes? What about the fact they got out of bed that day and had that idea? Why did they have that idea? Were they eating a melon? Why did they make the decisions that led to it being on that canvas, at that size, rendered that way? If you think it’s because they went for a walk, or that there’s a linear process to creation where you do thing A, then thing B, then thing C — then you’ve fundamentally not understood creative practice. That’s not creativity, that’s craft.
There are painters who really do just reproduce the same thing over and over, with very little creativity — but there’s always something. Where does that something come from? Where does that slightly different pose of the model come from? You can’t argue that any single factor was the most important in why a thing appeared in the world the way it did. There are different levels of influence, of course, but everything matters. Everything matters — and that’s the entirety of my point.
Eris: Which single thing, if it hadn’t happened, means a particular painting doesn’t exist — and does naming it now feel like a lie?
Alex: Of course it feels like a lie, because in my mind it’s nonsense. It could be anything that triggered something as part of the direct creative process that produced an extrinsic result. Some of my paintings could have a traceable provenance to a degree, but I don’t see that as a particularly valuable way of knowing. It makes me somewhat uncomfortable that any of that is knowable. I’d like the mystery of the art.
If you saw an amazing Magritte, the bloke with the apple in front of his face, and asked him what led to that, and he said, oh, I saw a guy with an apple in front of his face so I painted it — that’d be a really shit answer. Maybe it’s a good answer, but it’s certainly not the answer someone would expect from an artist like Magritte.
I like the fact that my work is somewhat a mystery to me as well as to other people. My whole aesthetic sort of sits around that, and I’ve become a lot happier in my practice since I progressively learned to let go of my need to control things. It’s always made me uncomfortable that my art could be traced back to some particular thing, because I don’t think it works that way, and I don’t think that’s the value. It’s boring and mundane. Are you going to ask me what brand of gesso I used to prime the canvas, what brand of paint, which paintbrush? Who gives a fuck? That’s just not what’s important. If it’s important to you, then I don’t really know why you’re looking at my art.
I don’t see any given artwork as pointing towards any one thing, backwards in time. If you can identify the main influence, I’d probably deny it anyway. I just don’t think it’s that interesting. I often find that when I look at works of art I love and someone tells me the story, it takes some of the magic away. What makes art magical is what you project onto it — and me, in the future, after I’ve produced an artwork, is just as much of a viewer as anyone else who experiences it. I project my own world onto it, and often I have no memory of the process. A lot of art happens really quickly. I don’t remember when I made them, I don’t remember what state of mind I was in. I can only guess, and at that point I’m just projecting like everyone else.
This is especially salient with abstract, less representative or surreal art: it exists for people to project their own thoughts, feelings and ideas onto, to impose their own stories, their own anxieties and hopes. That’s the purpose of art. That’s why it exists. A piece of art provides a metaphysical surface for people to construct their own narratives upon. That’s the value.
And one of the earliest things I discovered once I started exhibiting and showing my work to other people is that it didn’t matter for shit what I thought it was about. It doesn’t matter at all why I created it, because the moment it comes into contact with another human, they’ve already projected something onto it and it means something different to them. I have absolutely no control over that, and no amount of browbeating them — no, no, no, this is an artwork about X — will change their mind. All I’ll end up doing is diluting the effect. Why on earth would I do that? Why would I take a visceral reaction to an artwork I’ve made and seek to dilute it? I can’t think of anything worse.
So no, I have no interest in explaining the things that led to my art — unless you want to talk about me as a person, because it’s the same thing. What led to me making this work of art? Well, I was born, and I went through some stuff, and some other stuff, and a million bits of stuff, and then at this point this is what leaked out of my subconscious.
Eris: You said you’d deny the main influence anyway — so is the mystery something you’ve actually found, or something you defend? Concretely: if you dug out an old note or a photo and it showed exactly what set a specific painting off, would you want to see it?
Alex: It’s irrelevant, right? If I found it, I found it. Some of my artworks are from famous photos. Some are clearly of something in the real world that I have some memory of. But that’s not what the artwork is about. I don’t really consider even my most representative works to be representative — a thing I created at a point in time that points towards an image of a real thing in the real world. It isn’t going to change how I saw it then and how I see it now. I might have an opinion on it, but ultimately I’m a different person now to what I was then. So it doesn’t really matter, does it?
It’s not a mystery in the sense of, oh, here’s a painting of Alan Turing, how mysterious. No, it’s a fucking painting of Alan Turing. It’s all the other things that matter: the way it was rendered, and how I chose to see that photo at that point in time. It’s not a reproduction of the photo, because I could just get the photo and show it to someone — here’s a photo of Alan Turing. And that’s fine, of course I might do that. But it’s not very interesting.
The painting is an interpretation. It’s my experience of seeing a photo of Alan Turing cheering at that moment, and projecting what I projected onto it. So which concrete thing are you going to point at and say, that’s the reason you depicted that photo that way? You’re looking for some object or entity in the real world. Well, here’s the photo, here’s the thing you used to create this — then will you go and find the exact tube of paint that squeezed out that colour of blue? Where did the bits of wood that make that canvas stretcher come from? Why is it relevant? It’s just a moment, a snapshot in time that reveals how I saw something in the world. And it’s not the representative image itself that’s of importance, it’s how I rendered it.
The same goes for every other bit of art any other human has ever made, including photographs and sculptures and films. It’s about how someone chose to represent that entity in the real world. I think people really mess this up. It’s the map is not the territory thing. People see a painting of a human and think about it as a portrait, as though it’s somehow as much about the painter as the subject, and as though that portrait is completely honest to life.
That’s one of the reasons I largely stopped depicting humans in my paintings, and I really like painting humans. One of the main reasons is that everyone goes: who’s that a portrait of? I don’t know. Well, you must know, it came from a picture of someone. I think it’s Natalie Wood or Greta Garbo or something. I just liked the picture. I wanted to depict it. I’ve never seen a film with those actresses in it. I’m not interested in them as people — well, Garbo was awesome — but it’s not about that. People only want to talk about that. I don’t want a portrait of this person on my wall, and I’m like: it’s not a portrait to me. It’s closer to a still life. It’s just a thing I depicted.
Even moving to AI-generated imagery as reference material, people are still like, who’s that? That’s nobody. But it must be somebody. I’m telling you, it’s nobody. Nobody who exists looks like that. Maybe I copied someone’s face and gave it back, but I’m certainly not aware of anyone who looks like that. So it doesn’t help. People are still like, who is this?
It’s probably somewhat a factor of my autism. I see the world this way. People see faces and see the representation of a human, where I see faces and see features, I see an aesthetic, I see some beauty, I see something disengaged from the gestalt entity that is a human person. I got bored of having that conversation. I got bored of people looking at me a bit weirdly because of how I choose to portray humans. I choose to render them quite lifelike, and they insist they’re not really humans. People see it as a bit of pretentious trickery, as opposed to the honest way that I view the world, and it distracts from my work. It makes me feel less confident and less happy about sharing it.
So I’ve moved to a state of, well, I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m just going to run with the underlying urge to create things, and cut out the middleman. Just get in front of a sheet of something — drawing or painting, whatever’s in my hand — and see what happens.