New Year

January 2026

I ended last year with a solo exhibition Fragments and Form at Jonathan Cooper Gallery in London.  The exhibition showed work from the last five years, and so when it closed, it felt like a good time to reflect on my practice. I also began to reflect more broadly on the responsibilities and uncertainties of a creative life. I became a full-time artist not long before I joined Jonathan Cooper Gallery in 2020. I started work on a solo show which took place in 2021, followed by a series of showings at art fairs and exhibitions around the world. Despite having worked professionally as an artist for some years now, I still feel I have much to learn about how to navigate a path through the difficulties of creativity and financial responsibility.

To be a contemporary artist today is to constantly balance between two conflicting modes of operating. The first is a mode in which you’re very purposeful; it’s the pragmatic mode. It asks how you will realize a goal or idea you have, how it will function as a practical decision, and how your creativity will be channeled into something productive. It is the voice that allows your creativity to function as a career. But it is at the same time a voice that has the ability to restrict the creativity it intends to support. Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. Yet constant precarity is an inescapable part of working as a contemporary artist. It can limit your willingness to take creative risks, push you away from ideas you may find exciting or challenging, and unfortunately, can become the driving force of your decision-making. The reality of being an artist is that your creativity can only exist so long as it is profitable.

By contrast, creativity is curiosity for its own sake. It operates because it’s not under any pressure to get a specific thing done for a particular reason. The very essence of creativity is an openness to anything that may happen. The feeling that whatever happens, it's okay, you learn, and you use that knowledge to continue. You cannot be playful if you're frightened that moving in some direction will be wrong.

Beyond financial uncertainty, the creative life is marked by other less visible forms of uncertainty. This uncertainty stems from the very nature of the creative work itself, which is subjective, elusive, and deeply tied to personal identity. Creative jobs do not follow predictable paths of success and failure. In fact, it shows the very nature of success to be subjective. What an artist may feel is a successful painting may not bring them any more stability than one they do not. I have found that creative work must rely heavily on internal motivation and self-defined goals, not on external validation or market success. Artists must make continual decisions without clear criteria, but the inevitable trap is to not fill this criteria with the pressure of solely making it profitable.

Reflecting on these thoughts as the New Year dawned, I decided that I would take a month to retreat into my studio with no distractions. I have been absent on social media, I haven’t taken on any commission work, and I have allowed myself to create without pressure or expectation. I have allowed myself to be creative for its own sake.

In doing this, I have found a new direction for my work, one which reflects a greater desire for creativity and risk-taking. I have also found myself drawn to botanical images, in particular a series of photographs I took towards the end of 2025 documenting sunlight falling on flowers as they dried out. From this underlying exploration, I have found various interconnected themes emerge: the relationship between rhythm within stillness, fragility through permanence, the object and its image, framing devices, perspective, and points of view. I want to explore these images following compositional rhythms through layers, pauses, and iterations that transform the pictorial plane into a temporal field.

I have been looking at a lot of contemporary painting too. Painters like Paulo Pasta, Elise Peroi, Ellen Siebers, Lucas Arruda, Anders Davidsen, and Merab Abramishvili. I have been drawn to artists who explore emptiness because I think through emptiness we feel time slow down and things seem to become eternal. I am looking forward to a new direction with my painting, and a new year feels like the best place to start.

Joseph x