ARTISTS DON'T SELL ART. THEY SELL INSPIRATION

For a long time, I believed that being an artist was largely about making images. Strong images. Images that worked visually, that showed technical ability, that carried a recognisable style. I believed that if I focused hard enough on craft and consistency, the rest would follow naturally. The work would speak for itself. People would understand it, connect with it, and everything else would fall into place.

That belief isn’t entirely wrong, but it’s incomplete.

What I didn’t fully appreciate early on was where art actually ends up when it succeeds. It doesn’t stay in studios. It doesn’t live in portfolios or on websites. It doesn’t even remain in galleries for very long. If it works, if it genuinely connects, it finds its way into people’s homes. Into their private spaces. Into the background of their everyday lives.

And once I began to understand that, the way I thought about my role as an artist started to change.

I no longer see my job as simply producing paintings or prints. I see it as creating something that people choose to live with. Something they invite into their personal environment and allow to sit there quietly, day after day, influencing how a space feels and, by extension, how they feel within that space.

That shift in perspective brings a different kind of responsibility with it.

When someone hangs a piece of art in their home, they’re not just responding to colour or composition in a moment. They’re making a long-term decision. They’re choosing a presence. They’re choosing an energy. They’re choosing something that will be there in the morning and in the evening, in moments of calm and moments of chaos, through changes in light, mood, and circumstance.

Art, in that context, stops being an object and starts becoming a companion of sorts. It becomes part of the architecture of someone’s life. And that’s not something I take lightly.

This is why I don’t believe artists simply sell art. I believe they sell inspiration — not in a loud or performative sense, but in a quiet, sustained, lived-in way. Inspiration that doesn’t shout instructions or demand attention, but sits patiently and gives something back over time.

Understanding that changed the standard I hold myself to.

Early in my career, like most artists, I was focused on making work that stood out immediately. Work that caught the eye. Work that made an impact in a short amount of time. That instinct makes sense, especially when you’re trying to establish yourself, but it’s also limited. It prioritises immediacy over longevity. It values reaction more than relationship.

Living with art is not the same as encountering it once.

Repetition is the real test. Seeing something briefly in a gallery and liking it is easy. Seeing the same piece every single day and still feeling something from it is much harder. Over time, work either opens up or it collapses. It either continues to offer nuance and depth, or it becomes visual noise.

Once I started thinking about art in those terms, it became impossible to ignore how much responsibility sits behind even the smallest decisions. Colour choices stop being aesthetic preferences and start being emotional commitments. Composition stops being about balance on a canvas and starts being about how the eye moves through a space over years, not minutes. Texture, restraint, scale, negative space — all of it matters in a way that goes far beyond technique.

Technical skill is essential, but it’s not the destination. It’s the baseline.

I’ve seen an enormous amount of technically brilliant art that leaves me completely unmoved. Perfectly executed, flawless on paper, but emotionally hollow. It impresses, but it doesn’t resonate. It doesn’t linger. It doesn’t change the atmosphere of a room or the mindset of the person standing in it.

For me, that isn’t enough.

I’m far more interested in work that carries emotional intelligence — work that understands how it behaves over time, how it interacts with its environment, how it makes someone feel without needing to announce itself. That kind of work is harder to define and harder to make, but it’s also far more durable.

This is where the idea of responsibility becomes central.

I don’t believe artists are responsible for controlling interpretation. People will bring their own experiences, memories, and emotions to a piece, and that’s exactly how it should be. A straight person is going to look at Between The Capes with Superman and Batman kissing differently to someone who is gay, because their relationship with the narrative of the piece is different, their life experience and reality is going to create a different perspective. However, I do believe artists are responsible for understanding the emotional territory their work occupies and whether they are entering that territory deliberately or accidentally.

Emotion isn’t something that appears by chance. It’s embedded in the work through decisions — sometimes conscious, sometimes instinctive, but decisions nonetheless. Colour relationships carry mood. Materials carry associations. Balance and imbalance create tension or calm. Even silence, even what’s left unsaid or unused, has weight.

Over time, I’ve become much more aware of how these elements work together, and much less interested in creating work that relies on cleverness or shock to sustain interest. Those things burn quickly. They don’t reward repetition. They don’t age well.

I’m more drawn to work that holds its ground quietly. Work that doesn’t demand attention but earns it. Work that can sit in a room and continue to feel relevant without constantly trying to prove itself.

That shift has also changed how I think about beauty.

Beauty is often treated with suspicion in contemporary art, as if it’s shallow or unserious, as if emotional accessibility somehow undermines depth. I don’t share that view. I think beauty is one of the most powerful tools an artist has, precisely because it’s disarming. It creates openness. It invites people in long enough for something more complex to happen underneath.

But beauty without intention is just surface. It becomes decorative. It exists to be consumed quickly and replaced just as quickly. Beauty with intention, on the other hand, becomes a carrier. It holds emotion, memory, and meaning. It becomes something people return to rather than move past.

That distinction matters to me, and it plays a huge role in what I’m willing to release into the world.

One of the realities of working at a high standard is that not everything you make deserves to be shown. This is something that often goes unseen from the outside. There’s a vast difference between making work and standing behind it. Making is exploratory. It’s allowed to fail. It’s necessary for growth. Releasing work is a declaration of belief.

It’s saying that this piece is strong enough to exist independently. That it can hold its own in someone else’s space. That it contributes something meaningful rather than simply occupying room.

I’ve spent significant time on pieces that never leave the studio, not because they’re terrible, but because they don’t meet that standard. They don’t give enough back. They don’t justify the space they would take up in someone’s home or life. I don’t want to be a parody of another artist or a genre of art. I don’t want people to see a piece and think ‘didn’t another artist do basically the same concept?’ 

That process of editing, of withholding, of deciding what not to show, is just as important as the act of creation itself. It’s part of respecting the audience, even when they never see that decision being made.

The difference between viewing art and living with it becomes especially clear here. In a gallery, art exists within a carefully controlled context. Lighting, spacing, expectation — all of it shapes how the work is received. Engagement is intentional and often brief. In a home, that framework disappears. The work has to coexist with everything else. Changing light, shifting moods, different seasons, different phases of life.

Something that feels exciting in a gallery can feel exhausting in a domestic space. Something that seems understated at first glance can become deeply grounding over time. Understanding that difference has fundamentally altered how I evaluate my own work.

I often ask myself what it would feel like to live with a piece rather than look at it. What it would be like to walk past it without consciously engaging, to catch it in peripheral vision, to notice it only when something about it subtly shifts the feeling of a room. Does it still work then? Does it still contribute something, even when it isn’t being actively examined?

If it doesn’t, then it isn’t finished.

This way of thinking inevitably slows things down. It resists the pressure to constantly produce, constantly release, constantly be visible. But I don’t see that as a drawback. If art is meant to inspire, to influence, to quietly shape how people feel in their own spaces, then speed and volume can’t be the primary measures of success.

Care has to be part of the process.

And care takes time.

Inspiration, in this sense, isn’t something an artist gets to claim. It isn’t a label you attach to your work or a box you tick. It’s something that happens when enough care, intention, and honesty are embedded into the work that it continues to give something back long after it’s finished.

I’ve come to see my role less as someone who produces objects and more as someone who shapes experiences. Experiences that are visual, emotional, and psychological, and that unfold slowly over time. Experiences that don’t ask to be understood immediately, but reward patience and familiarity.

That perspective has made me more demanding of myself, not less. It’s raised the bar for what I’m willing to put into the world and made me more conscious of the fact that every piece I release eventually becomes part of someone else’s life, not just my own.

That’s a privilege.

And privileges come with responsibility.

When art is done properly, it doesn’t just fill a space. It shapes it. It influences how a room feels, how a person feels within that room, and sometimes even how they see themselves within it.

If that’s true, then selling art isn’t really about selling objects at all. It’s about offering inspiration in its most practical, lived-in form. Inspiration that doesn’t shout, doesn’t instruct, and doesn’t expire quickly, but sits quietly and does its work over time.

That is the standard I hold myself to — not because it’s easy, and not because it guarantees anything, but because if I’m asking someone to live with my work, then I owe them that level of care.