There is a line in one of my favourite films, *Where'd You Go, Bernadette*, that has stayed with me since I first heard it. Paul, one of Bernadette's oldest colleagues, tells her, “People like you must create. That's what you were brought into this world to do, Bernadette. If you don't, you become a menace to society.”

I've always understood what he means by that, and it resonated with me instantly.

The process of creating, as I talked about last week, has no time limits and can come from the strangest of places. It can be a subconscious process that sits in the back of your mind whilst you get on with your day, then comes to the forefront when it is allowed to. That constraint can be arduous, dimming or frustrating until you have the chance to put those creative ideas into action. It can throw you off kilter and send you wayward in your everyday tasks in ways that are not always obvious.

I've thought about that quite a lot this year. I've produced more paintings in the past year than I have in the previous ten, mostly commissioned pieces, but also some personal work that I haven't shared just yet.

I don't think I create because I have a constant stream of brilliant ideas that are desperate to get out. I don't think I paint because I feel particularly productive when I'm doing it, either. And I certainly don't paint because I always feel inspired. I paint because when I don't, I notice that something is missing, or that an uncertainty is throwing me off balance in daily life.

For me, that something doesn't necessarily have to be painting. It could be planning the next few months of work, or thinking about what to create and why. Sometimes it's a commission. Sometimes it's an experiment. Sometimes it's simply sitting down and working through an idea that may never become anything.

But afterwards, that feeling seems to have gone.

I think that's what I've slowly started to understand about myself and creativity. For me, it's not necessarily about constantly producing something. It's more about having somewhere for that part of me to exist.

I suppose that's why I found the idea in *Where'd You Go, Bernadette* so familiar. Bernadette isn't simply someone who happens to be good at architecture. Creating is part of how she understands herself. When she stops doing it, it isn't just that she isn't designing buildings anymore. There's a part of her that has nowhere to go. The story takes that idea to a much more extreme place than anything I've experienced, of course, but the underlying feeling is something I recognise.

When I was painting occasionally, I could go weeks or months without picking up a brush and not really think much of it. But once painting became a consistent part of my life, I started to notice the difference between periods where I was creating and periods where I wasn't.

The strange thing is that it isn't necessarily about how much I paint.

Sometimes I'll spend hours working on a commission and feel completely satisfied. Other times I'll spend a whole evening doing something that probably wouldn't look like much from the outside, and yet somehow feel better for having done it.

It's almost as though painting gives all of the thoughts and ideas that sit somewhere in the back of my head a physical place to go, or even just helps me focus more clearly on something that might be bothering me. And perhaps that's what I was trying to explain in the first volume when I talked about lying awake in my bedroom as a child. I was imagining things then, and I'm still imagining things now.

The difference is that I'm older, and I've found a way of turning some of those things into something tangible.

That's probably why I've never been particularly interested in the idea that every painting has to have a deep meaning. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes the only reason I've painted something is because I wanted to see whether I could. But even then, I think there's something meaningful about the act of making it.

I've also realised that this becomes slightly more complicated when your creativity adds a business dimension. There is a danger that something which once filled that missing space in your life can become another thing on your to-do list. A commission isn't just a painting anymore. It's a deadline, an email, a payment, a photograph, a frame, packaging and a delivery.

ALGO Fine Art requires more of me than an idea and a paintbrush. It's a website, social media pages, communication, planning and all the other things that come with trying to turn something you love into something sustainable. And I enjoy all of that far more than I ever expected to, even if I do wish I had more hours in the day to work on it than I do.

But none of it quite replaces the feeling of actually creating.

That's the part I never want to lose.

Ultimately, I don't think I started ALGO Fine Art because I wanted to sell paintings. I think I started it because I needed somewhere for the creative part of me to go, and then took a completely unexpected opportunity when it came about.

The need to create was there first.

And I think that's probably why that line from *Where'd You Go, Bernadette* has become something of a comfort to me.

When I'm not feeling particularly inspired, when I've gone a little while without painting, or when I'm questioning whether an idea is actually worth pursuing, I come back to it. It's become less of a comfort film and more of a motivator.

*People like you must create.*

Because when I do, the world seems clearer, more oxidised and navigable.

And perhaps that's reason enough.

I found myself standing in front of a painting that looked familiar. At first, I couldn’t figure out why.

I was at the National Gallery in London, wandering through the rooms and doing what I usually do in galleries; looking at things I recognise, finding things I've never seen before and occasionally stopping for much longer than I intended to. I think I've always enjoyed going to galleries, but since I've started painting seriously, I find that I rarely look at a painting in quite the same way anymore. I'm not just looking at what has been painted. I'm increasingly interested in why it looks the way it does.

That brought me to George Stubbs' Whistlejacket.

I'm sure I had seen it before, but this time I actually stopped and looked at it properly. The first thing that struck me was the scale. It is enormous. Whistlejacket himself is nearly three metres high, and when you're standing in front of that much painting, it is difficult not to give it your attention.

But the longer I stood there, the more I became interested in how little there actually is in the painting.

There is the horse, of course, but around him there is very little to tell you where he is. No landscape, no stable, no rider, no collection of objects trying to give you a sense of the scene. Just a pale, almost empty background. It sounds like a very simple decision, but it completely changes the way you look at the painting.

The horse doesn't have to compete with anything.

And that was the point at which I started seeing something that felt surprisingly familiar.

A lot of my recent portraits have developed in a similar way. I've become increasingly drawn towards fairly plain backgrounds, particularly the darker greens and muted colours I've been using, with the subject occupying the majority of the composition. I'd never looked at Whistlejacket and thought, “That's where I got that idea from”, because I didn't. The connection simply hadn't occurred to me.

Standing there yesterday, it suddenly did.

Obviously, the paintings themselves are very different. I'm not trying to compare my work to Stubbs, and there are several centuries of painting between the two. But there is something about the way the subject has been isolated that feels familiar. The background isn't there to compete with the horse. It gives the horse somewhere to exist, and then gets out of the way.

The more I thought about that, the more I started thinking about how often the background in a painting is treated as something that needs to be filled.

I've certainly been guilty of that.

When I first started painting, I was much more concerned with getting the thing I was painting right. If I was painting a dog, I wanted the dog to look like the dog. The markings had to be right, the eyes had to be right, the proportions had to be right, and I would spend a ridiculous amount of time worrying about details that probably nobody else would ever notice.

I still care about all of those things, but I've become much more interested in what happens once the subject is right.

Where does it sit? How much space does it have? What colour surrounds it? What happens if I remove something rather than add something? Those decisions can completely change the way the same subject feels.

I've noticed this particularly with my own pet portraits. A photograph might show a dog sitting in a garden, on a sofa or somewhere else that makes perfect sense in the context of the photograph, but that doesn't necessarily mean the surroundings belong in the painting. Sometimes they add something. Sometimes they distract me from the thing I'm actually interested in. I've started to enjoy that process of stripping things back.

It probably has something to do with the Victorian specimen drawings I've talked about before. There is something about the way those illustrations present their subjects that I've always found appealing. They are incredibly detailed, but they aren't cluttered. The subject is isolated and carefully observed, almost as though the artist is asking you to spend some time really looking at it. I think that is increasingly what I want from my own work. Not necessarily for it to be complicated, but for it to be considered.

That is probably why Whistlejacket caught me in the way it did. It isn't particularly complicated in terms of what is actually in the composition, but that doesn't mean there isn't an enormous amount of thought behind it. Stubbs had spent years studying horses, including their anatomy, and that knowledge is obvious when you look at the painting closely. Yet the final image doesn't feel like an anatomical exercise. It feels like a portrait of a very particular animal. That distinction interests me.

There is a point in painting where observation turns into interpretation. You can know exactly what something looks like and still have to decide what you want someone else to see.

I think that is probably where I'm beginning to find my own style. Not in the way I paint fur, or the particular colour I use for a background, or even in the way I construct an animal's face, but in the decisions I make about what is important and what isn't. And I think that is something I want to keep developing with ALGO Fine Art.

The work I've done over the last year has taught me an enormous amount. Painting dogs and cats repeatedly has forced me to become much more observant, not just of the obvious characteristics of an animal, but of the tiny differences that make one individual recognisable from another. It has also given me a much better understanding of composition, colour and how much information a painting actually needs.

The interesting thing is that those lessons don't necessarily have to stay within pet portraiture.

If I've learned something from painting one subject, there is no reason I can't take that knowledge somewhere else. That doesn't mean changing direction for the sake of changing direction. It means allowing the work to develop naturally as I become more confident in what I'm doing.

Perhaps that is what I found most interesting about standing in front of Whistlejacket. I wasn't particularly interested in the fact that it was a painting of a horse. I was interested in the decisions Stubbs had made around it, and how those decisions affected the way I experienced the painting more than two hundred years after it was made.

It made me look at my own work slightly differently too.

I started thinking about the backgrounds I've been using, the way I position my subjects, how much space I leave around them and why certain compositions feel more natural to me than others. Some of those decisions I've made deliberately, while others have probably developed simply because I've painted enough portraits to know when something feels right.

Perhaps that is one of the more interesting parts of becoming an artist. You spend a lot of time learning the rules, learning the techniques and trying to understand what other people have done, and then gradually you start noticing that you have developed your own preferences without necessarily deciding to.

I went to the National Gallery and I will be back.

Coming soon