2024 Retrospective Part 2 - Speaking of Art, Recovery and Hope

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. Hello and welcome back and a Happy New Year. I hope you had a good holiday stroke Christmas stroke New Year period. I recognise that this period is quite hard for many people, especially my neurodivergent friends and hope the last couple of weeks gave you peace and a bit of respite from the onslaught of the holiday period and I hope that getting back into normal life isn’t too jarring for everybody. This year is looking like it’s going to be anything but boring for all of us so be safe and be nice to each other. This is part two of my 2024 first six months, 496 minutes, 8.3 hours and 25 episodes retrospective of Art Against Mental Illness. This is coming a bit later than I intended, partly because I discovered that no one really listens to podcasts over Christmas so there wasn’t really much point in publishing anything and partly because I was enjoying myself too much in the studio and thus was sort of avoiding this. It’s currently minus temperatures outside and my studio is almost unbearably cold and I have to wrap up like an Arctic explorer to spend any time out there so I’m in the cozy confines of my office recording this for you people. So without any further ado I’m just going to get back into my per episode recap. The NIST starts with episode 10 released July 21st, 2024 called Suffering for Art. This was quite a dark one. I can’t really remember exactly what triggered my decision to do an episode on this. I was listening to a series of podcasts that there was a retrospective on the early 90s Seattle music scene, the whole grunge scene and and I think anyone who’s even vaguely aware of that period will know we lost quite a few incredible artists such as Kurt Cobain, Lane Staley, Mark Lanigan and latterly Chris Cornell to various self-inflicted tragedies and I think that led me to sort of reflect on the nature of art as a conversation with an artist and their fans and that these people died because they were suffering in their lives because of their fame, because of their lifestyles, because of very many complex reasons that led to extremely poor mental health and that they used their art as an outlet and I think that there’s a sort of dangerous perspective that an artist must suffer to make good art which I think is incredibly wrong. All artists use art as a way to relieve suffering and they suffered despite their art not because of it and I think this is a really important point to remember. I think it’s contingent to us as art fans to support the people that we revere rather than to constantly pressure and badger them. There’s been a particular problem over the past year with various artists in the spotlight. The one that springs to mind is Chapel Rhone who are really suffering because of what’s called the toxic fanhood where your very own fans are hounding you to the ends of the earth and watching everything that you do and it can become quite unpleasant and I think Kurt Cobain particularly had an issue with this. I think we need to give our heroes a bit of space and a bit of a break and don’t expect them to constantly feed our Nifa catharsis with their misery. If you love someone just let them be who they need to be and give them space. I do remember I actually wrote this episode while I was on a train going to and from a coastal town in Scotland where me and my family went and we found a beach and I went swimming in the sea in Scotland which I’m sure you’ll agree is quite brave of me and I encountered a seal who was just bobbing around in the water watching me and there were dolphins cavorting about a mile away and it was absolutely incredible experience so I had a bit of a jarring juxtaposition in here as I was experiencing something quite life-affirming and well considering a bunch of people who had lost theirs through mental illness so it’s all quite poignant to me so this episode is quite a personal episode and something that I really really feel very strongly about. Cobain, Cornell, Plath, Van Gogh, Whitehouse and countless others none of them owed me you or anyone else their pain and certainly not their lives. For you and I to experience their pain for it to feel authentic these artists must have experienced that pain but let us be specific here depression can be fatal it kills via suicide shunning or criticizing an artist for seeming more cheerful or positive or dare I say it happy is in a sense equivalent to expecting a cancer sufferer to dial back their treatment so that you can continue to empathize in their struggle. We don’t need artists to suffer to gratify our need for catharsis suffering happens that’s a fact of life but it is never necessary never never it is always wrong to wish or otherwise expect someone else to experience pain for our own gratification these people were not martyrs to their art or their fans they were humans experiencing intolerable levels of illness and misery they used art creativity performance as a release and a relief and we should be thankful and feel blessed that they did but they didn’t suffer because of their art they suffered despite their art. On to the next one this was July 31st 2024 called Therapeutic Outlet Transitions so this was another one of my therapeutic outlet sessions where I basically just get in front of a microphone and ramble about something. This was happening while I was in the process of moving house which I really really didn’t want to do moving to a new studio uprooting my life and and moving to a situation I was not at all happy with but had come about via necessity it turned out that that move probably wasn’t so wise after all and so I took the hit on this while not actually removing the problem that it was supposed to remove so it’s all been a bit complicated and unpleasant. So I ramble on here about how transitions for most of us are inherently traumatic I think a lot of people when going through some sort of transition or difficult period will drop their creative endeavors as something that is perhaps a luxury of time and space and effort that can’t be afforded because you need all your mental energy and time to deal with whatever you’re dealing with the transition that you’re experiencing and I argue that this is the wrong way to think about this and if you rely on art as a therapeutic outlet like I do then you need to make room in whatever way you can to to spend time doing your creative practices despite the fact that you might find that difficult to do because this is such an important part of who you are and how you maintain your mental health and I think the time you need it most is when life is its most challenging so don’t consider this time that you spend doing this as a luxury I think you should consider it as essential and I recognize it’s not always possible to do this but wherever it is don’t drop your creative activities because you think they’re a luxury keep them going because they’re definitely not if like me you’re going through a transition you have my sympathy and if like me you’re the type of person that finds these things very very difficult you need to make sure that you look after yourself you need to make sure that you have your space to escape and to re-center it there is never a more important time to find those spaces and in times like this Thursday August the 8th 2024 how to be creative part one all that jazz now I promised to continue this uh this series uh at some point I got to part two which we’ll cover in a little bit um but I I put quite a lot of effort into these I feel like I want to do this subject justice and therefore I do quite a lot of research and I try and bring in quite a lot of bring quite a lot of subject areas and inspiration and and so they take me a long time to write and trying to write episodes two of this series was for me very very difficult and so very many false starts but the first episode sort of came tumbling out of me off the back of a bit of a deep dive into this and and I really enjoyed writing it and I I talk about the rudiments of creativity and introduce the concept that I come back to over and over again which is the need to introduce a bit of chaos into your artistic practice I talk about um John Coltrane a lot and his approach to creativity and um and and various other artists as well and I think this is a really good episode I’m really pleased with that so with my original list mastery conviction and open mind collaboration and focus you have a set of ingredients that can be put together in varying measures to cook up something different but to really mix things up you need a sprinkling of chaos it’s like making your omelette with all the usual stuff then picking up something random from the fridge or pantry to add in every time you make it to see what works sure some anomalies will end up being choked down or just thrown in the bin but once in a while you’ll create something magical so chaos isn’t one of the core ingredients it’s more like a method or seasoning it can be applied to any or all of the ingredients at any point in the process in any amount it could be argued that as far as creativity is concerned it is the magic unicorn juice episode 13 fighting back uh sunday september the 8th there was a a month between these two episodes and that was not my intention this is probably where my challenges of 2024 hit their nadir or their apex depending on which way you want to look at it and i i simply was not functioning on any meaningful level and i felt like i needed to do my how to be creative part too and i couldn’t i couldn’t get it out and i couldn’t really find any mental energy to do the things that i needed to do to get another episode out i i didn’t think anyone cared i was listening i thought it was all pointless i i really had a crisis of of everything um i’d i’d spent a bunch of time preparing for a solo exhibition that went well went well but not many people turned up and i’ve been using the preparation and the energy and the momentum for that to prop up my sort of self-esteem and and that all came crashing down when when the exhibition was over and i found myself in a very dark place indeed and it took me a few weeks to recalibrate and figure out what was going on and what i needed to do to make myself better and that’s when this episode came out i i chose to record a very frank episode about what had been happening to me and how i was at that point and how how my mental health was at that point and to make a resolution a commitment to to get better and to dig myself out of this hole and i remember at this point i was still very very low and where i am now versus that is is quite stark i’m in a in a much better mental space but what’s important to note is that my life situation the problems that i had back then have not gone away it’s arguable they’ve got worse um but i feel way more optimistic way more energetic way more enthusiastic and way more creative i’m being ridiculously creative at the moment and and that gives me hope that i can find solutions to my problems and to really um as as this episode says fight back to really recover and to um make something of the next year and the coming years despite all the horrors that are going on in the world and my my resolution is to help people is to do something for the community and do something for other people to help anyone who has struggled like i have to lead a better life to conquer their mental illness and to find solace beauty and comfort in creativity and and i hope i’m achieving that in some small way but i’m not done by a very long shot and i’m going to make this bigger and better over the coming year and and i hope you’ll join me for it i think i’ll look back on this episode from time to time in the future and and use it to remind myself of of how bad things can get and how recovery is possible and as as much as this podcast is is to a degree um a sort of a diary or a memoir of my life and the things that i’m thinking this is going to be one of the most important chapters so this is my fight back i choose to recognize distress itself as my enemy and to face it down to do this i need to accept the fact while recognizing my situation on its face values it is what it is nothing more nothing less then i need to do the things i need to do to show my brain what i expect of it i will keep taking on reality one day at a time i will keep fighting i will get better and i acknowledge that there will be peaks and troughs but i choose to keep fighting so episode 14 uh october the 15th 2024 i was still putting things out pretty slow um that was what three weeks later something like that this one’s called overthinking and i think this was me finally breaking my right as block in terms of creating content for this podcast and i think probably in general as well one of the the things that comes with depression and anxiety is a tendency to overthink everything and to uh overanalyze and to find reasons to not do things to find reasons to be pessimistic and it’s not it’s not a choice as such it’s just something that our brains are doing because of the the poor state that they’re in and and so i wrote an episode on overthinking to try and get me out of overthinking and i think it’s a really really important part of the artistic process and to manifest itself in all sorts of ways for example writers block or not being able to uh continue a podcast and this really was the point where i started again almost i almost start to think of it as season two of this podcast although it’s not how i divide things up that’s ultimately what it became and uh and it’s a good episode and it feels really fresh for me and it does feel like a bit like a new start and and again i think i’ll look back on this one there’s quite a positive thing let me be explicit about this overthinking is a poison to spontaneity and art regardless how you approach it is underpinned by spontaneity the strokes or the marks you put down on a canvas or paper the notes you lay down on a piano there’s always a level of spontaneity that happens to create the thing in front of you you are not a machine you’re a sentient being and therefore the job of creation is a process and it’s necessarily spontaneous episode 15 uh october 24 2024 finding your voice what’s interesting to me is how little i understand my own artistic voice for me it feels like i’m i’m very haphazard stylistically speaking and that i’m always trying different things i’m always throwing everything i can at whatever i’m doing and and anything that comes to my mind or anything that’s available around me sort of just gets stuffed in it’s a bit of a kitchen sink approach and sometimes i look across my recent body of work and think you know you could take chunks out of this and think this is not the same person that made this when it is and i and i think that’s wrong and i’ve been told many times by people that know you can’t see the thread that runs through this but we all can and um and that people see that it ties together and they see that it expresses who i am as a person and i think i’m having to become more confident about this idea that well yes i’m always going to have a very varied stylistic base and and as i’m doing at the moment i think the job is to pull them all together into a sort of single statement that can define my body of work and my approach to art and and i’m becoming more confident about that even if i don’t really still know what my voice is but your voice evolves as i say in this episode over time anyway and and don’t be afraid of that and i don’t think i’ll ever be satisfied and stay in one place and i don’t really want to be and so finding my voice is about coaxing that that thread out of my body of work and and sort of finding that path that runs through it and celebrating and exposing that and and that that’s my voice and at some point i’m going to be able to express what that is i hope finding your voice is as much about blocking other people’s voices it’s as much about not listening to critics of not judging yourself by yardsticks of culture or society and to trust your own instincts and to trust that your work will connect with people and if you can do that all the while keeping your sanity then you’ll be a force to be reckoned with but one way or another your voice will only come when you stop shutting it down and just let it flow episode 16 was a a bit of a frivolous addendum to episode 15 this was on released on the same day i literally walked out of the house after having recorded this and was wandering around in the woods and found myself sort of thinking about this process and and sort of walking around and thinking about how i create this this podcast and thinking how that relates to sort of me finding my voice and and why it is the way it is and i ramble on a bit about ai i don’t really know what my overall point here was but it felt like i was saying something decent and i was recording it because i wanted to write it up as a script and do it as another episode as a sort of finding of a voice part two and when i listened back to it i was like well i’ve actually said what i wanted to say here quite well and the sound quality was possibly decent so i just i just shared it and it’s all all very meta because you get a sense from this about how i conceive of these episodes and how i i sort of write them and create my notes and my material to sort of rewrite and this is also me finding a bit more confidence in my ability to just talk and to say good things so i quite like that one maybe i could get a model to talk in my voice but would it make the choices that i made would it if i said to it insert some examples in here would it would chose the examples that i chose because they’re very much uh part of me my brain the things that i know the knowledge that i have on first date october the 31st i released how to be creative part two mo art my problems this is second part of the how to be creative series and it covers one of the most important aspects with regards to my philosophy of of the creation of art which is art is fundamentally the business of solving problems and the if you’re not solving problems you’re probably not being very creative and to be creative you have to push yourself and you have to push your limits problems that you encounter the problem of how to take this thing you see in front of you or this idea that you have or this emotion that you feel and translate that into something on a canvas or on a film or on a video or as a sculpture or whatever it is you’re doing how do you do that how do you solve the problem of instantiating that making ideas tangible and solid in the real world and i think that’s one of the the main components of what creativity is perhaps the most important job for an artist is connecting with other humans via their medium art is communication a conversation with other humans via the shared understanding of culture if you expose your voice in the lazy artificial way people will hear that lack of care and passion and turn their backs you can’t connect with the world if you don’t have something compelling or at least vaguely interesting to say and then affecting and engaging means to do that and you can’t create something compelling and engaging before having figured out the problem of having to do so and doing so is where the good stuff is it’s the part that involves meaningful work it’s the part that involves challenge and growth it’s the part where you find mindfulness and flow it’s the part that involved a sense of fulfillment and achievement episode 18 art against mental politics art protest and catharsis november the 7th 2024 this one was conceived of and written just as the american election was happening so i wrote the first draft expecting to record it just before the election didn’t get round to it and then had to sort of redraft it a bit after i discovered that trump had won the election obviously i wasn’t particularly happy about this advent as many people aren’t apart from you know Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk and sort of thinking about the function of art as a political vehicle a vehicle of protest or catharsis or a driver for political change and whether or not you believe you can affect the world from a political perspective of art is one thing but the idea that art and politics aren’t intrinsically linked is is nonsensical and just making art is a an act of protest in itself is an act of rebellion political systems and societies resist change and innovation and as we’re discovering more and more particularly in the us that the ability to speak freely and create freely is a gift and it’s one that should be sacrosanct as a as a core part of human rights and it’s increasingly becoming difficult or even dangerous to do that as despotic or fascist movements spring up all over the world and the first thing these movements are going to do or their leaders are going to do is to curve self-expression which includes creativity and at any point simply painting a landscape or a or a still life is is a political act at that point because they don’t want people thinking they don’t want people creating they want people to be docile and compliant and creative people tend not to be compliant so i don’t really care who you are if you’re making art you’re you’re creating to some degree a piece of political culture and it’s worth remembering that especially when people tell you that you know why are you getting involved in all this political stuff you know you should just make nice things and and i would strongly advise you to push back on that keep doing what you do and keep fighting in a good fight whether your art is explicitly political or purely aesthetic your freedom of expression to choose what to represent and how is a reinforcement of liberty in the middle finger up to tyrants to quote german poet and playwright bertalt brex art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it next time you find some space for creativity or when you find yourself experiencing some great art which is basically constantly remember this in itself it is an act of defiance defiance of the status quo and the defiance of all those who seek to perpetuate the status quo for their own malignant ends artists change be the change episode 19 your brain on art part one bad homeostasis uh tuesday november the 12th 2024 this was part of what is currently a two part series part one i cover my theory of bad homeostasis which i talk a lot about um neurochemicals as relates to um how we operate as humans and and how um they dictate our mental health and i might as well bring in episode 20 at the same time here which is your brain on art part two zen in the art of mental wellness maintenance monday november the 18th 2024 these two were basically a continuation the first one i sort of cover the basic principles of neuroscience and episode two i finally get around to how that manifests in poor mental health with a view to setting up an overall argument as to why creativity helps manage and improve mental health what’s interesting about this is that the first part of this is one of the most listened to episodes i’ve ever done the second part of it is one of the least listened to episodes and i don’t really know what to take from that but it’s certainly not a emphatic endorsement of this i think i probably spent too much time talking about the science and not enough time talking about the art but this is who i am um i i love science i love technology and i love art i love it all and i love it when it comes together so i’ll probably well i’ll definitely do at least a part three on this i can probably do about 12 parts on it but i don’t think that would be very popular but i’ll at least try and finish off this series because it is important to me and i know there are people out there that do care about this stuff so um it will get finished and uh and yeah screw the lot yeah i’m gonna do it anyway um only joking i love you all mental illness is just like any other type of illness it has causes and treatments however there’s an odd and pervasive stigma around mental illness that seeks to make us believe it’s all imagined and therefore the sufferer can pull themselves together snap out of it or cheer up but mental illness is never imagined and people can’t just pull themselves together any more than someone with dysentery can just get on with eating and give the toilet a break episode 21 art takes abstract fluidity uh november the 21st a few days later so i’ve i’ve published a few of these i’ll explain what they are now because i’ll probably gloss over the the rest of them uh essentially you know i started dictating random crap while i’m doing stuff usually walking around the scottish countryside but sometimes in my studio and i’ve also filmed myself working and various other bits and pieces i thought i’d share this as an experiment to see if you find it interesting to see if it gave you um a little bit of a window into my creative practice and maybe help people think about that practice in a much more concrete way i’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months uh dripping ink and an acrylic medium down canvases and bits of wood as a an experiment on how i could create new sort of forms and textures and patterns by just letting the substances i work with do their thing and then how can i form those into works of art either abstract art or figurative art using sort of a background of of abstraction and i’ve really really enjoyed doing that and it’s really coming together now it’s worth checking out my youtube channel for some videos on this stuff uh i’ll be posting more i found this period of experimentation a little bit daunting and jading as much as i enjoyed actually doing it i i sort of didn’t really know where i was going with it so i’ve sort of taken a a detour to try and expand my creative palette as it were and and now i’m trying to merge that back into my overall body of work and it’s working really well and i’m really really loving what i’m doing and it’s um it’s also making me revisit a lot of old artworks and bring them back to life again um this is also in part because i’ve got no money and i can’t really afford to buy new canvases and things so i’m forced to go and look at what i’ve got and make use of that and it’s been a really creative period and i start this new year feeling unbelievably positive about my artistic output even if i don’t quite know what i’m going to do with it so anyway i’ll probably still keep publishing the odd art take uh as i record something that’s worth listening to and doesn’t require too much of you understanding the visual side of what i’m doing um and i hope you enjoy them for me they’re they’re quite fun to make and so i’ll definitely do more i think the other thing i’ve got going on here is uh since i i don’t really know how to conceive of abstract paintings letting nature do its thing gives me hints and points directions for me into how to progress and and try different things right uh episode 22 uh november the 26th 2024 egotista imposter the misunderstood relationship between art and identity now i really enjoyed making this one i did some research on freda carlo for this which um i really enjoyed and and she was such a brilliant and inspiring artist and human i felt really pleased that i was able to talk about her in this context and i think that um she’s one of the very exemplars of the concept of of identity through art and i think this is me sort of figuring out something about my own art in that i i consider this podcast part of my artistic body of work and you know and i consider increasingly my identity as an important part of the work that i produce and and how that’s perceived and i always sort of feel a little bit like that that seems a little bit egotistical or narcissistic this was me sort of figuring out what my view on that was and my view on it is that you’re going to put yourself into your art anyway you’re you only produce what you produce because you are you and only you can do that and and therefore as much you might try and get out of the way of of your subject and the creative muse you’re there all over it anyway whether you like it or not so you might as well embrace that and celebrate it you don’t have to do what freda carlo did and paint lots of pictures of herself as a way to to share her feelings on the world and her emotional states and her points of view but there’s no sense either in hiding yourself it’s you this is about you once you sell your artwork it’s still to a degree about you even if other people project themselves onto it and that’s part of the beauty of art is it’s the synthesis of you and someone else your brain and someone else’s brain your ideas and someone else’s ideas so just let it all out in fact your humanity and your presence in your history your life your reputation your influence the color of your skin your height the tone of your voice these are all things that send signals to other humans about you and the thing that you’re conveying and it’s inescapable you can try and change it but there’s only so far you can go with this your communications your interface with the world is your identity some people choose to expose and mediate that via selfies and 30 second videos some choose to paint a bowl of fruit that took them weeks to create some dance some write erotic fan fiction about vampires episode 23 talking therapy art policing cancer and recovery with Sharon Milton so this was the first interview episode i’ve done i’ve got two published so far um this one with my good friend Sharon who’s been incredibly supportive of me my podcast and my art ever since i met her around a year ago i guess she’s got such an amazing story and a really inspiring story as well and and has had such a fascinating interesting life and it was an absolute pleasure to interview her and i’m really privileged that she agreed to do this and to be the first person to be interviewed by me because who knows how how that was going to go but it went really really well and so i’m super pleased with this one and if you’ve not listened to it i really recommend it above almost all other episodes it’s so so fascinating and Sharon will no doubt turn up again on this podcast at some point i was looking at the world through very different lens when i was living with cancer in terms of you know every sunset was like looking at the last sunset every daffodil was like the only daffodil on the whole world so it gave me a perspective where i really saw beauty in absolutely everything which you know was quite poignant and for me that period of my art was about capturing in absolute detail and with precision episode 24 was another art take this was more of me dripping things down the canvas and talking a bit about how we should embrace natural processes particularly things like decay because they’re quite beautiful in their own right this process when it takes longer you’re sort of stretching the time frame out when you get to as you get to enjoy the the various stages and i need to remind myself that you know art for me is all about the process and part of that process is just watching things happen whether it’s uh you know a portrait emerging you know in front of me as i paint it or whether i’ve created these organic effects letting inks or water or whatever flow across a surface and what they’re going to do and trying not to interfere with them it’s so intensely mindful episode 25 Tuesday December the 10th 2024 mind your language Alex against art speak now i loved making this one it really did go to the core of one of the reasons that i have found it difficult to break into art and to feel like i belonged here as part of the art community because every time i read anything out about art i find it unbelievably condescending and self-important and basically unintelligible and for a while i thought this was a deficiency in in me i’m i’m pretty sure i’m dyslexic and the ADHD doesn’t help i find reading large blocks of text incredibly unpleasant and difficult and slow and and that’s pretty much defines the majority of of art criticism and art commentary uh forever and i hate it it’s horrible it’s grotesque and and it’s really alienating and and for me art needs to be inclusive it should be something for everyone it should be out there so that anyone can understand it it should be explained in plain language um so that people can engage with it i’m not saying there’s no place for people uh writing this pseudo-intellectual drivel um and i’m sure many people love it but i don’t and i want people out there to know that you don’t have to either it’s not prerequisite you don’t have to write this bollocks about your art you don’t have to learn a whole new vocabulary just to describe a still life that you painted and you don’t have to read this crap and i also proved that chat gpt can write it really well so it’s not even that impressive and i’m really sorry if you’re the sort of person that writes this the people who write this stuff clearly have a great degree of love for their for their art form um it’s just that i don’t like it soz it’s a book about frances bacon by someone called michael learest i just scanned through some of the texts and found this paragraph i noticed that this paragraph was not only in the most heinous of art speak but is also basically one entire long sentence i’m going to attempt to read this sentence um and and see how i get on with it i’m reading directly from the book here it’s a good book and frances bacon is a good artist let’s see how well i uh i butcher this line behind the glass which according to him is a means of unifying material unevenness in the painting by which i suspect or by which i suspect is also intended to temper to some extent the realistic virulence of the works or perhaps to give a certain ceremonial dignity to the presentation of the character’s court it would seem in more often than not in a warm tangle of erotic exchange or in the commonplace waking or sleeping attitudes not to mention the grossly functional ones or again to extend to the whole picture including the flat background and to finalize thanks to an almost literally englobing that that process of setting a part of removal from the neutrality of everyday life which is achieved as regards to certain of its features by the most diverse means bacon’s canvases at once so effervescent and so controlled provide for the spectator who looks at them as a whole and grasps them in their diversity as a striking image of this unique contemporary artist in in all his complexity a complexity i had hoped markedly to reduce by studying him in the mirror of his work oh my god that was one sentence please god help me episode 26 was the first half of this retrospective and i’m sure you all found that absolutely riveting as you were finding this one and finally uh episode 27 talking therapy art science tech and burnout with mark burden i’ve known mark for a long time i really really loved this conversation we take different approaches to art and science and technology and we come from quite different worlds but we’re very very similar people and we really riff off each other when we talk and for me this conversation only scratched the absolute surface of the overlap of what we think and and how we approach the world and and we tend to get really excitable when we talk to each other which isn’t very often so i’ve resolved to do some more stuff with him in in the new year um whether or not that turns up on this podcast or whether or not just my youtube channel or perhaps i’ll start a new podcast or channel um but you’ll be hearing more from mark hopefully and i’m really really looking forward to that because i really love talking to him the process of making something in whatever media is a kind of way of articulating a response and a reaction to something in life and even the most abstractive artists will still be responding to something it’s a reaction art is a reaction to something and that brings me to the end that’s that’s the most recent episode apart from this one obviously thank you for listening and so where does this uh leave me going into 2025 um well as i’ve mentioned in this episode many earlier last year has been extremely challenging for me i know there are far worse predicaments to be in than the mine um which is only too obvious every time we turn on the tv or peer into the social sphere or or read the news but one way or another i’ve arguably experienced the worst period of mental health of my whole life um certainly the most extreme or profound but i’m still here and there are many positives for example i started a podcast hurrah i discovered what an amazing support network i have both family friends new friends old friends i have had so much support and thank you all if any of you are listening to this and all my artistic friends both here and and down south and overseas and i i can’t express enough how touching and incredible the support and help i’ve received is and and i i don’t really know how i can repay everyone but i shall try and obviously my wife and kids have been incredible and part with me and so thank you for them you’re all beautiful and wonderful and i love you all and hopefully i’ll uh i’ll have the the mental capacity and energy to to repay the favor to every one of you in the coming year or two other positives well i’ve learned a hell of a lot over the last year about myself about podcasting about arts about the just the world in general um and i love learning so that’s been amazing i have a permanently changed world view it’s opening up lots of new opportunities for me to explore that i never even dreamt i would have i didn’t ever think i would be doing something like this um and hopefully all of that will help me maintain my mental health and also not to return to this fugue state that i’ve been in for the last five years because my mental health problems didn’t just suddenly spring up and in winter 2024 though they were really ongoing and building up to their zenith at that point and i need to make sure i don’t go back to the state that i was in before because it really wasn’t helpful and so here’s to 2025 hopefully it’ll be a little less traumatic for me than 2024 may you all have the right sort of interesting times and the best of mental health for 2025 and may you also all find endless time to be creative as for this podcast i have two more interviews in the can yes two the first of which will be with you very shortly both those interviews are really really good um really really inspiring i have a long list of subject areas i’m going to cover i’m only really just getting started with all of this stuff and every time i let my brain run freely i come up with a whole bunch of new things i want to cover i’ve actually got a backlog of of material and i’m i’m raring to do even more so you’re not going to get rid of me quite yet i’ve also got some new episode formats i’m going to try out so watch this space um but otherwise please remember to like rate review and share this podcast support me on patreon at patreon.com forward slash adix loveless where you can sign up for various plans that give me a little bit of pocket money to help me get by and buy new art materials follow me on blue sky where i’m alex loveless artist this is where i am um the most vociferous and share the most if you’ve got a space on your wall go and buy some of my art on my website alexloveless.co.uk that’s all for now have a happy new year and i’ll see you soon