The Art of Refining vs. The Joy of Creation
How I'm learning to balance Precise with Passion when it comes to creative pursuits
Navigating the thin line between professional design and personal artistic expression is a little like trying to master a grand piano; both demand daily dedication, but the emotional investment and outcomes are often worlds apart. For the past thirty years, I've worked as a designer in the world of FMCG brand design, where precision and client satisfaction dictate almost every strategic decision and click of the mouse. But outside of this professional environment, my soul yearns for a raw unfiltered expression of personal art, which, at times, seems almost impossible to uncover.
Many seem to think that because I’m creative at work, I’m therefore automatically armed with a wealth of creative experience when it comes to being artistic on a personal level. I appear to be advanced in the boardroom; yet in other artistic endeavours, I can hardly seem to tie my own shoelaces.
On this journey of trying to unpick why, I’ve started to make a little more sense of the emotions all crashing together inside my head; they seem to mash together the easy time I have when solving problems for other people at work, vs. how very hard it can be when I’m simply creating for the fun of creating.
Some of it seems to come down to feelings of vulnerability.
I thrive on the excitement of the new: those untrodden pathways to trying new things and seeing what happens. I’ve learnt to decorate birthday cakes at 3am, with the fear of disappointment on my children’s faces the next day hanging as a very pointed purpose over me. I’ve made my daughter bespoke dresses from touristy tea-towels, with the eyes of the world’s most judgmental neighbours to contend with; and I’ve learnt to fly an actual plane upside-down with my life hanging literally in the balance.
When it comes to pulling rabbits out of hats, you might think of me as a bit of a creative James Bond at times, although whilst these, along with too many others to mention, have been pulled off with a huge grin on my face, they’re all too often only achieved by the skin of my teeth.
It seems that I’m ever so slightly addicted to pushing myself to places that I probably shouldn’t.
This was clearly illustrated to me years ago when I undertook the challenge of learning to play a grand piano in public, by way of surprising my wife Twinkle, for our second wedding anniversary.
Just so we’re clear, I don’t play the piano, and more so, I can’t really read music. Sure, I know ‘Every Good Boy Deserves Footballs’ (the way children were taught how to recall the notes back in the 1970s), and I did play the Clarinet at school which my Nan seemed to like, but looking back it would have been horrific to anyone who had working ears.
The dream of being able to sit and play the piano had been in me for a long time. Piano was way cooler than a crappy Clarinet; it’s a huge instrument, and when played in public spaces like the ground floor of the Debenhams department store where I worked for years, its romantic sounds could, and did literally stop people in their tracks.
One day, I would possess this power.
Along Came My Worst Idea Ever
Emma was someone at work who could play the piano; I’d had an idea to play in public for an upcoming anniversary, and she agreed to help. For reasons I won’t go into here, the very cheesy theme to the 1977 James Bond movie ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’ entitled' ‘Nobody Does It Better’ by Marvin Hamlisch was selected, although just to be clear, I wouldn’t be trying to out-sing Carly Simon, who’d made it famous back when I was six years old.
The idea was that we’d have a fancy meal at the fancy restaurant, the chef would appear a bit like Gordon Ramsey and brag about his food, apologise for the lack of ambient music thanks to the pianist phoning in sick, and then turn to me and comment ‘I hear you can play though Sir?’
Twinkle’s jaw would drop, I’d wow the room and our anniversary would be marked in history with a large golden tick. Easy, right?
There were 8 months in which to pull it off, and Emma found a particularly schmaltzy version specifically for the piano which I slowly started to learn, to the point where it was actually quite credible. I must have played it a thousand times before the big day.
The Problem Of Unpredictability
Unlike my design work, where refinement and revisions are all part of the process, this musical journey was a needle-straight pathway towards a public revelation of my skills - or lack thereof.
No matter how many hours I’d had at the keys, there was no-one sitting next to me holding my hand if things went wrong.
It highlighted the very obvious contrast between the controlled environment of design work and the unpredictable nature of live performance. The fear of faltering in real-time was a stark departure from the comfort of my design process, where I could tweak and polish until perfection revealed itself.
Here, one wrong note, and the entire thing could collapse, and that though terrified me more than any design presentation I’d given to a client.
Whilst watching the recent Robbie Williams documentary on Netflix, it became clear that these sorts of things are actually fairly common, even for those far more practiced in the art of live performance than a total novice like me. He’d had a crisis of confidence; something almost unthinkable given his international stature.
And Lene Nystrom from iconic pop group Aqua (you know, the one who was singing about Barbie long before Barbie became a Hollywood movie) left the stage for over an hour whilst performing in Perth recently too, citing a panic attack as the cause.
This vulnerability does appear to be something quite real, for some at least.
I did pull my piano idea off in the end. There were no bum notes and it probably was fairly impressive for those listening. After all that planning, I kinda felt it would be ok, except for that one thing - the confidence.
I was left very much shaken AND stirred!
With hindsight, this journey into music appears to be similar to my ventures into personal art, exposing the vulnerable and unpredictable aspects inherent in creative expression, and it brings to light an intriguing paradox: the meticulous nature of my design work versus the liberating, albeit daunting, experience of creating art for art's sake.
I’m starting to realise that feeling vulnerable is all part of what making art is about, and it’s probably this very thing that I lack confidence in and therefore where I need the most practice.
Hiding In Plain Sight
I do try to make art on an almost daily basis by rolling it into my morning coffee routine. For those who don’t already know, when I go for a walk to get coffee each morning, I sit and draw customers in my sketchbook using a very particular style - focussing generally only on heads, from the side, and always without a mouth.
That last part is a throwback to the lockdown days where most customers walked in, ordered their coffee, and left, fully covered from the nose down, fearful of catching the Spicy Cough. I started to draw people without their mouth so I didn’t have to draw their mask.
It’s become a sort of go-to personal project for me, especially useful when I’m tired or just plain busy, because I don’t have to think too much. For me, it’s a sanctuary, where I’m both present in the moment and yet also invisible, hidden by the casual chaos of most Melbourne cafés.
This sacred practice, however, is shadowed by an undercurrent of vulnerability.
The unsolicited curiosity of a dreaded onlooker transforms this solitude into a stage, where fear and worry sit and stare, sometimes with a smirk, sometimes with a smile but possibly more often than not with a look of ‘what the fuck are you drawing, mate?’.
My sketchbook, a deeply personal collection of fleeting moments, suddenly feels like an open invitation for judgment. I’m back at that grand piano again, on stage, with a front row full of anxiety.
Just last week this happened, whereby a waitress was wiping down the next table, and caught sight of what I was doing. I’d actually drawn her the week before - reinterpreting her amazing arm of tattoos onto a super long neck, as I rarely draw bodies. It did look rather silly, but it just ended up that way at the time - and I quite liked it for the happy quirk that it was. But she wanted to see what I’d been drawing, and suffice to say, I became somewhat of a ‘rabbit in the headlights’. I had to protect myself at all costs, shutting down her requests, and most definitely not sharing the neck-tattoo drawing I’d made of her.
Actually, once this sort of thing happens, I tend not to return to the same café ever again. It’s like I’ve been found out doing something very wrong, and embarrassment washes over me.
I’ve drawn in museums and galleries a lot too, and because they’re generally quiet places, I tend to wear a pair of headphones whilst sketching, as a physical barrier to the outside world. It’s a trick I learnt on the Tube in London, whereby you can’t distance yourself physically from others, but mentally, you can. And as long as I don’t look up and see people watching, I’m fine.
Sadly, this doesn’t really work in the cafés where I now hang out, because it kills the ambience of the very moment I’m trying to capture.
So, when all else fails, and people see what I’m drawing, the book gets closed, the moment is ruined, and I leave.
Justifying The Risk
I do love the sketches I create as part of my daily routine, which form a sort of diary that only I can decode. They’re a physical reminder of how much I love the process of making art, but they’re usually for me, and me alone.
What happens next is that some of these sketches are turned into finished pieces of art, that I upload to Instagram; polished versions of those people I’ve drawn, recreated digitally from the original sketch, and presented to the world in red and black, as a sort of justification for the risk of drawing in public.
It feels that unless I polish some of them into finished pieces, that my morning sessions are somehow just a waste of an hour or two to enjoy coffee and a break from the frantic shit at home, as the kids are getting ready for school.
I’m slowly realising that the real purpose of me drawing like this is mostly for the joy of simply doing it, and that this time is actually my meditation time; the thing The Psychologist had said I needed in my world so badly. Maybe I should just leverage this love of sitting and drawing people in my own little bubble more, and stop it right there. But something inside of me tells me that without proving to people that I actually get some form of output from the exercise, it’s just pointless.
Regardless of whether they become final pieces or remain as sketches hidden away forever (as the vast majority of them do), this project is probably the closest I’ve come to the perfect balance or both the joy of the process coupled with the art of refining.
I’ve no idea where it will go next, and the fact I’m not really thinking about it, is probably a really good thing.
Trying To Keep It Real
The piano piece for my anniversary was a leap into the unknown, a stark reminder of the exhilaration and terror of live art. It was a moment of truth, revealing my deep-seated fear of failure and the realisation that I've conditioned myself to rely on a safety net of endless revisions and control that professional design affords.
Yet, this experience also underscored a crucial lesson: the beauty of art lies not in the flawless execution but in the raw, authentic expression of one's self. It's about embracing the process, with all its imperfections and uncertainties, rather than the polished final product.
No one would have noticed a bum note, or a mistimed section, so long as I kept a smile on my face. Failure, after all, is the very thing that keeps us all grounded.
I seem to be able to acknowledge that here, yet still truly struggle to live by those words. But, as I move forward, I’ll try and reconcile these two facets of my creative identity. I’ll seek to embrace the unpredictability and spontaneity of personal art, allowing it to inform and enrich my professional work.
In the realm of art and design, perhaps it's not about choosing either precision or joy, but finding a balance where both can coexist, enhancing each other in the process.
Over to you!
I’d love to hear from you if you relate to anything written in this post.
Have you ever put yourself into a situation you thought you wanted to experience, and then discovered you hated it?
Do you like sharing your sketchbooks? Or do you fear what others will say about your rawest of mark making?
Is sketching for you about the process of just doodling, or do you use sketches to work out what you’ll do in a finished piece?