Starting Out

For the last couple of years I’ve had a proper studio.

It was, in many ways, the dream I’d been working towards for years. A completely separate space. Quiet. Beautiful lighting. Good ergonomics. Plenty of storage. My piano. Cameras. Backgrounds. Everything carefully arranged so I could finally do my best work.

And yet, something about it never quite felt right.

I couldn’t really explain why. I was grateful for it. I knew how fortunate I was. But there was a quiet feeling that I’d somehow got ahead of myself.

Recently I was listening to David Whyte talking about what it means to begin something well. He says that when something is just starting, you don’t actually want too much. Too much money, too much space, too many tools, too much time. You need just enough for the real conversation to happen.

The resources should arrive because the work needs them.

Not the other way around.

Looking back over the last fifteen years, I think I’ve repeatedly confused the theatre around the work with the work itself.

I don’t just mean buying gear.

I mean building elaborate operational worlds around creativity. Beautiful systems. Better studios. Better workflows. Better organisation. Better software. Better lighting. Better storage. Better plans.

I’ve spent an extraordinary amount of energy constructing the place where the work might happen.

Sometimes more energy than simply entering the conversation itself.

I can see it now in music. I can see it in motion design. I can see it in content creation.

Even my studio, which I loved for a long time, eventually began to feel like this.

It had become bigger than the conversation. Sometimes the conversation, the work, the experiment or the next step actually needs to be small. It needs to have a small space to emerge from. A lot of theatre around a small utterance of creativity can stifle it.

I think that’s partly why I’m happy to let it go now.

The next step for me this year is to build a studio at the end of our garden with my brother-in-law. It already feels quite different. It feels quiet, connected and comfortable, and closer to the size of an actual life—close to the house, close to the kids and within the land we already live on, instead of trying to create a separate world somewhere else.