I’m neither a sketchbook worshipper, nor a prolific doodler, although I still manage to challenge myself through the proactive desire to find out how the best do their job and attempt to emulate it in my own creative practice. The word ‘creative’ is somewhat ambiguous in its own respect, especially from my own perspective. Sometimes I’m the businessman with creative influences, whilst other times
I’m rooted as the creative with business influences. This diversity allows me to not just broaden my own work, but provide me with the ability to tackle a multitude of challenging ideas and concepts through the not-the-norm way of working. Ultimately, I see myself as a digital designer – with my work generally passing through the computer or a camera lens at some point during its lifespan. I like this, purely for the fact that I’m comfortable with it – and that isn’t something I’m ashamed to admit. If I’m comfortable with the processes and techniques, it gives me more time to think about the challenging messages, ideas and concepts that no-one else may muster but everyone else will remember. If I take 2 years to master yet another process to apply to an idea, the likelihood is that someone else will have made that idea happen in the meantime. I aim to be the forerunner, not the one catching up behind. I focus on people, stories and fleeting occurrences in a way that makes them stick in the mind much longer. Thinking differently (or as cliché as it sounds, ‘out of the box’) is something that I aim to do on a daily basis. It keeps me thinking, keeps me looking. I see the world as a chocolate box of new ideas, it’s just a matter of finding those ideas amongst a cacophony of bad advertising and poorly executed attempts at trying to convey them before. Documentary is something that has always found a place in my work on some level. Whether it be documenting other people’s lives through my artwork or documenting my own life through writing and note taking, I feel it allows me to immerse myself in the wider picture – something particularly critical where my practice can see me glued to a camera viewfinder or Mac screen for hours, perhaps days on end. If my work is to be placed in the public eye, it only seems right to see what the public are getting up to. I’ve always had a desire to be in the public eye in some shape or form. When I was younger, I was a keen actor. Performance was key, adding razzmatazz to situations that could have otherwise fallen flat. I like to think that this has continued throughout my journey as a creative, despite evolving to having my work put out there in an all the more anonymous, behind the camera way. Still, I know how to make an entrance and how to captivate an audience’s eye, my design work forming a direct extension of this (despite my stage being more ‘drizzly billboard’ than ‘glitzy theatre.’ Maybe a billboard can be glamorous?)
