Chris Sutcliff

“THE CURE FOR BOREDOM IS CURIOSITY. THERE IS NO CURE FOR CURIOSITY.”

Dorothy Parker (attributed)

1893 – 1967.

Progress has been frustratingly sluggish of late. I procrastinate. I laze. I ponder. My absence is tangible.

It is a difficult truth to grasp that your passions are a double edged blade. Or at least they CAN be when you mismanage them. They are that which you most love and that which you most hate, and sometimes I hate to have to paint. I find these non-active periods anxious and disorienting and they have been known to last for months at a time. Is there a cure? Perhaps. Recently I have glimpsed a probable root cause of these deteriorations. Boredom.

I’ve bored myself with the work I’ve been doing. An overwhelming sense of ‘same old, same old.’ And it follows that if I’m bored with it then you probably are too. This was not my original intention. So let’s rewind.

A while ago I decided to paint a nude and a landscape. Two established disciplines that I have rarely done before and am in no such rush to do again. Actually, “decided” is a slightly misleading explanation of what I did – I felt I HAD to do them and so talked myself into believing it was a brilliant tactical manoeuvre. In reality it was a cretinous manoeuvre, with all the tactics of an exceptionally stupid worm. You see, all the art on my site is of a level of competence that I thought may bewilder some of the viewers. The notion struck me that it may be hard for people to work out if I was any good or just a scribbler of no consequence. My ego didn’t sleep for a week. It was a question I wanted answering as well.

I thought it would be useful to have an anchor point, something for people to easily identify and therefore judge the workmanship appropriately. Hence the nude and the landscape.  I remember it making more sense at the time. Maybe I’d even learn something.

Well, I did learn something. I learned that the difference between Joy and Disappointment is all in the picture you think other people will like. I learned to drag my feet when I’m painting things that don’t really interest me. I learned how important Haagen Dazs is for combating depression. Not that there’s anything wrong with the paintings. I actually quite like them and did manage to refine my techniques a little while working on them. But they took too long to do because I wasn’t doing anything new and inventive, I was copying set forms from a photographic source and I felt a bit like I’d gone backwards. I do not believe the world has benefited from one more painted nude and a tree and I had lost all curiosity in either.

Mostly I hated the entire process.

So here’s the lesson and the point of this entry. People are smarter than you think. Certainly they are smart enough to look at an image and work out whether or not they like it. You don’t need to paint a chair better than Van Gogh or a sunset better than Turner or a woman with facial feature displacement better than Picasso. Just be good at what you are doing and people will get it. So get on with something interesting. Something that’s never been seen before. Don’t waste your time pandering to taste. Also, for me, I now know I want to learn to work much more quickly in order to retain interest and enthusiasm and not get traumatised by perfecting the tiniest detail that no one really sees anyway.

This year I want to start selling prints through the site. This requires a very different way for me to work due to the constraints around scanning the finished image and also in terms of content as I am hoping to appeal to a slightly wider audience than I have to date. In short, my future work has to comprise of more arresting ideas and visual play with a higher quality of finish. I’ll probably muck both of those up.

Finally a note on time management.

I have previously harped on about tracking my painting hours in a spreadsheet and what a wonderful thing it all was. Sound anal? Well, that’s because it is, and I’m pleased to inform you that I’ve stopped doing it again. It was starting to feel like logging the time was more important than the quality of work and the experience of doing it. I hated that. It no doubt contributed to the feeling of overall boredom and soul-death. I don’t need a spreadsheet to tell me when I’ve had a good day or a bad day, I know it instinctively. I work now when the motivation is there to do it and I enjoy that a lot more than forcing the painting because I want to do more hours this month than I did in February. It turns your creativity into a job, and it’s not a job it’s my life. I can reliably advise you not to do anything so reductive as tracking every second you spend in your labours – it absolutely takes all the magic out of it. And whatever you do that has no magic is the only true waste of your time. I have an empty spreadsheet to prove it.

Since I wrote “Metamorphosis of an Idea” I have been forced to take those words and put them in a sandwich and eat the bastards. Every last spikey one of them. Humble pie was for pudding and then I washed it all down with a nice hot mug of shut the fuck up. In a restaurant known as “Keep your half-baked ideas to yourself”, where funnily enough I was the only diner.

In said blog, I had bleated on for paragraph after paragraph saying that making plans and setting goals was for idiots and, rather crushingly in retrospect, for people who actually wanted to be successful. Yeah. Way to go, Einstein. For some reason I then balanced this woefully inept platitude with a rather sketchy explanation that getting lost and admiring your surroundings was better than getting to where you wanted to be. Honestly, I must’ve been wearing my moron pants. Actually, part of what I said is sort of true only I have now arrived at the more concrete understanding that admiring your surroundings is what days off are for. Ahh, how naive I was back in August.

The truth is that making goals is really hard and sticking to them is impossible when you’re as lazy and easily distracted as I am. I go to extraordinary lengths sometimes just to not get on with stuff I should be doing. For example I am writing this and the cat hasn’t been fed for six days.

Also don’t think for one minute that I was smart enough to work any of this out for myself. Oh no! Help came and found me. Through an acquaintance I met a Life Coach some months back and we had a chat for a few hours which kind of polarised me back into what I needed to do to get any sort of success at all from my artwork. It was also oddly psycho-analytical; I genuinely sat on a couch and talked about my parents. I highly recommend seeing someone like this if you have the means to. If you’re local to me then get in touch with Tina Mayfield at www.theartscounsel.co.uk.  She is lovely and makes excellent coffee while she effortlessly puts your life in order.

The next enlightening slap around the chops I got was from a Manager at my work. In a chummy sort of way he shouted at me for two hours for not taking the initiative this year and following my plan to be a real life artist. By the time he’d finished I was belittled to the level of staring at my shoes like a five year old but a bit more determined that next year would be better. Sometimes gentle persuasion is a poor substitute for a well directed kick to the spuds.

Anyway, onwards to the point. From all this I have taken two lessons that have helped me and so I am passing them on to you.

1)      Write your goals down. They need to be achievable but stretching and they must have a timescale. Every time you pontificate jam your finger in your eye really hard and then shut up and get on with it and stop wasting everyone’s time. You have to keep checking on them as well, like a needy goldfish. They don’t go away. Look at them, then look at them again, then leave your wife and sleep with them.

2)      I have also set up a spreadsheet to monitor how much time I am spending doing my artwork per day, week, month and then year. I know that spreadsheets are something that only wankers do but this has seriously helped me. In November I only did eleven and a quarter hours of painting. Shocking and abysmal. No wonder every piece seems to take about four years – it’s because they actually do. This genuinely annoyed me and so here we are halfway through December and I’ve already done more hours than that. Great tool. You can adapt it to measure how much money you are making as well. I left this bit out because I hate crying.

I have a wager with my Manager about getting a certain amount of canvasses in galleries or shops or cafés by next November. Although the target is probably unrealistic it has had the desired effect of getting me back painting, albeit in an angry ‘I’ll show him’ sort of way. I’m not suggesting that as a third lesson you take up a nice healthy gambling addiction but, you know, get your mates behind you for support. Then win the bet and bleed them dry.

So I got my approach a bit wrong for a while but hopefully this makes amends. It’s all part of stumbling blindly and painfully through this arduous string of nonsensical tasks called life. Looking forward to my next astronomical miscalculation, it’s the only way I seem to learn.

Oh, and I don’t really own any moron pants. I had to steal yours.

“The map is not the territory.”

Alfred Korzybski. 1879 – 1950.

Having a life-plan and setting personal goals is probably the most valuable piece of advice that I will ever give you but never actually follow myself. It’s good advice because it’s obviously good to have a plan to work to and to always know where you are regarding that plan and to stringently plot your way towards a fulfilled life. I personally find it impractical because I have never once observed ‘life’ give a shit about anyone’s plans for it and the most rewarding and memorable moments of MY life have been entirely un-planned. You could argue that it is unwise to take life lessons from a guy who’s broke and lives in his mate’s box-room, only I’d argue back that I haven’t felt this content and together for years. I have yet to see the strategically planned route to faultless contentment written down – If you have this then please share the wealth.

I’ve been working on a canvas for a few weeks now and it’s taking me through the usual twists and turns as it tries to decide what it wants to be when it grows up. Actually, that reminds me, at a wedding the other week a seven year old boy asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Brilliant. I told him I wanted to be an Astronaught! Then I watched a program where I found out how tricky it is to poo in a space suit and that prolonged weightlessness makes your bones lose density, so then I wanted to be an Artist again. Anyway, I’m staring at this canvas and wishing it would make its mind up when I realised that now would be a great time to fulfil one of my blog promises and take you behind the scenes of idea development. Try and contain your excitement…

Sometimes you do a painting where you already know the outcome, if not the approach, such as a portrait or a landscape. This has its dull moments. For most of my paintings I start with a general direction and then allow serendipity to pretty much do all the work. This is because I am too lazy to think and because random chance has better ideas than I do. The initial idea for this canvas came from the movie ‘Iron Man’. On a wall in Tony Stark’s Malibu beach house he has an abstract painting that is a bunch of tessellating rectangles painted a flat bluey-grey, like slates on a roof. I thought it was cool and would be simple to reproduce so I set about doing my own version of it. If you do something like this yourself, then a useful tip is to not keep looking at the original, work from memory alone, this is because you’ll remember it incorrectly and will therefore do your own take much more easily. Unless you are an Autistic Savant, in which case it will be an exact replica.

Because nothing is ever simple I decided to complicate my version on purpose. I learnt very quickly that there are more shades of bluey-grey than the world will ever have use for and the best ideas always come when you have passed the point that they should have been implemented. I’m a bit of a sucker for details so I started to include scraps of printed paper that I could paint over allowing random bits to show through to the surface. For this I used what I had to hand, some newspaper, the trusty old Bible pages and a colleague questionnaire that had been passed round work that same day. The questionnaire had a series of statements such as “I get a sense of accomplishment from the work that I do”, followed by a rating bar by which you declared if you:-

A)    Strongly Agreed

B)    Agreed

C)    Disagreed or

D)    Strongly Disagreed.

I often wonder if these odd mechanisms of enforced manager/colleague engagement are restricted to the arena of tedium that is office work or if all jobs have their version of them. I don’t suppose there is much call for such inanity if your job is to rescue beached whales or do heart transplants or test drive racing cars. I should count myself lucky though, what if you’re one of those poor people who have to single handedly manage the night shift at a 24 hour petrol station kiosk? Do they get a sense of accomplishment from the work that they do?

A) Agree

B) Disagree

C) I’m sorry, I’m so tired & lonely I can’t remember the question or

D) I’ve already killed myself.

What I particularly hate about these questionnaires is that they subversively restrict your answers and then force you to think about them as though you actually care. It doesn’t matter how many times you try to re-inspire the interest in a monotonous job that crushes the souls of all that contribute to it, you can’t turn a see-saw into a roller coaster. Let’s all at least be honest with each other and have a laugh with a bit more:-

E)     I’m completely unaffected either way

F)     Oh great, ten minutes away from my job reading this

G)    I’m not here for accomplishment, I’m here to fund my college course / narcotic habit / gambling addiction / lack of social skills or

H)    Whatever you want me to write so that you never bother me again.

Anyway, this painting. I’m seeing all this work stuff and bible stuff and I’m starting to make connections towards what this painting may be about. Many, if not all, Artists will disagree with me on this point, but I quite like paintings to be specifically about something and to have neat titles. This is because my route to painting was via illustration which nearly always alludes to a piece of writing and therefore often shares its title. I also want to put some text on it somewhere to tie it all in and so the text will probably become titular. So I come up with a corker – “My Job is not my Religion”. Alright, so it’s painfully obvious but it would have got people thinking and making comparisons and discussing various levels of personal importance and so on. Boom. Case closed. Next canvas.

It niggled at me though and I thought about its various meanings and messages until I exhausted them and I realised that the title would only be affective if you actually had a dull job. Like the questionnaire it was too restrictive. Also what if you were a Priest? So I re-titled it by being less specific – “My Job is not…”

Now it could be anything you want it to be. Like the questionnaire again but with the open dialogue the questionnaire SHOULD have had. Here are some things my job is not:-

…the only reason I get up in the morning.

…an interesting way of breaking the ice with strangers at parties.

…how I’d want my kids to remember me.

…anywhere on my list of priorities, it is merely the thing which allows certain parts of my list of priorities to be realised.

See! Look at all the fun you could have with THAT title! Not that it matters now, I had to scrap it again due to another very obvious point. The thing is I really want all my paintings to hang in people’s houses where they can be properly enjoyed. As clever as it may or may not have been, who on earth wants to have a painting that reminds you of your job? Surely the painting should be one of a million things in your home that help you forget about your toils and take you somewhere better instead. I wonder if Forest Rangers buy paintings of Offices?

As I write this the painting still has no title and no text, it no longer knows what it wants to say about itself. The colour scale has changed from bluey-grey to turquoise and is growing an ominous orange splodge which may or may not make it to the final cut. It has fragments of printed paper which may or may not have any meaning anymore and will probably be further obscured before this day is out, rendering them pointless. The only resemblance it now has to Tony Stark’s canvas is the layout, and as mine has more rectangles than his it doesn’t even resemble that. What I am left with is a fluxing beast with a will of its own that is becoming something that I could not have imagined, let alone planned for – And that’s exactly how I like it. It keeps me as interested doing the work as it hopefully keeps the viewer interested when seeing the end result.

To tie all this up I have to go back to my original point about goal setting. A very good friend of mine, who is an avid goal setter and who hopefully won’t take offence at this, made a point about goal setting that I’d like to challenge a teeny bit. He made the comparison between setting a goal to achieve an end result and having a map to a geographical destination. “You wouldn’t drive from London to Edinburgh without a map” he said. His point being that with a map you would hop on the right motorway and get to Edinburgh using the most direct route and in the shortest amount of time. My counter point is equally simple – Life is a journey and not a destination. Not having a map puts the adventure back into things. It also forces you to involve more people to help you with your journey and allows you to help theirs, like a team effort. Finally it puts you in a whole host of unexpected places and situations with which you can enrich your short time on this planet –  a slow amble of discovery behind some cows on a dirt track in rural Devon is infinitely better than being stationary in a four mile tail-back south of Milton Keynes all in the name of pointing in the “right” direction.

I thought that I understood the world. Then Iggy Pop made a car insurance commercial and I realised that some things in life are worth understanding and some things are just sold to you by those intangible twits who put a price tag on everything. Screw those guys, I hope they marry Traffic Wardens and suffer an endless and bewildering social exile.

One of the ways in which I have managed to make sense of my own world is through working on my sketch books. I wanted to share some of my sketch book work with you so I had Rob (friendly neighbourhood woolly haired Scouser tech-boy) put a ‘Sketch’ section on the site and I have begun the long process of populating it with my favourite pages. This is a ‘long process’ and not a single job because I am reliant on a string of independent circumstances twining harmoniously together in order for me to deliver the goods. You see, the pages cannot be effectively scanned as this would mean flattening the book, an act that would simultaneously break its spine and break my heart. It is very old and well thumbed and mostly held together with sellotape and willpower, a single act of ruffianism will reduce it to confetti. So I have to sacrifice some picture quality and photograph them instead and for this I have to borrow my Dad’s camera. Since my Dad’s retirement he now goes on holiday every eight minutes or so, taking said camera with him. He turns visibly pale when I ask to use it. The four pictures I have managed to put on the site at the time of this writing were taken on the pavement on my front street in the sun and came out quite nicely (perspective skewed pages and crap photographic ability aside). The next twenty I took indoors with a variety of precariously balanced lamps and they came out dull and lifeless and were discarded immediately. I got an even tan though and nearly set the room on fire. So I need the sun for the right light and there is my next problem – Burnley gets sunny for about 6 minutes once every 47 years; so I will be 79 before I can photograph another four pages – Provided my Dad isn’t in Kuala Lumpur with the bloody camera. Finally, our internet is broken at Matt’s house where I live, so even if I had more pictures I would have to find an ingenious way of getting them onto the site. Like tying them to the leg of a carrier pigeon and stuffing it beak first into the disk drive, hoping for the best. We tried to get Sky to fix the internet only to discover that they now employ brick walls in their call-centres instead of people. We talked to the wall for a while and then realised it would just be quicker to grow old and die and not need the internet anymore. Honestly, how hard does this have to be?

It took me precisely two years to fill my first sketch book. I initially bought it as a means to combat boredom while the footie was on at my mate’s house. I’d go and visit, armed with a fancy pen (£3 WHSmiths), and start drawing and see what happened. What happened was an unexpected and extremely weird awakening of self analysis through scribbles. This book is about 5 inches square with 126 pages and if you read it you would stick me in a padded cell. I laid my soul bare in that tiny volume using just words and pictures and accidentally sorted my life out in the process. It is ten years since I completed it and even now some of the pages are rather painful for me to re-visit so I rarely pick it up. I named it “Pandora’s Box” for precisely that reason. Not one page of it will ever appear on this site.

With my psychoanalysis behind me I decided that my next book was going to be more of a showcase for my artistic talents, nice illustrations with no personal content at all. A plan which fell to shit in about 5 pages. I had totally forgotten that art is about paying homage to all that you love by recreating through yourself. How do you do that without being IN it? I have yet to find the artistic talent I was supposed to be showcasing. Although this book is slightly bigger than the first it has exactly the same amount of pages. The magic two years came and went and I had not finished it. Three years became six years and more and it was not done. Now here we are, ten years down the line and there are still 21 whole pages left to fill. A long time ago I wrote the words “Finish me you Chicken Shit” on strips of masking tape and stuck them to the cover to inspire a bit of urgency for completion. Those words are still there and are now its permanent cover and title, a constant mocking dare that I cannot ignore. It’s actually a good thing I haven’t finished though and I’ll tell you why – I only work on it when I have no canvasses to work on. So the last ten years have seen more canvas commissions than the preceding two – commissions that have mostly come from the book itself. It has been a powerful portfolio for me in a way that this website has yet to prove itself.

There are only selected images appearing on this site but I sincerely hope you like them. It will not be the same for me though, I like watching the expressions on peoples faces when they read it, the way they rub their fingers on it to feel all the textures. The internet has joined us and separated us all at the same time. But I can’t fit you all in my house so this will have to do. The most complex image probably took me about 8 hours and the shortest one I whipped out in about ten minutes. Depending on how you look at them they are either fraught with meaning or completely devoid of it, self referential or a reaction to the world, a royal waste of my time or the greatest single achievement I have yet produced. They are the only two things I have ever owned that I would make any sacrifice for, including running into a burning house to retrieve them. They are irreplaceable and, perhaps more importantly, they have no cash value whatsoever. And this is exactly why they have helped me to make sense of the world.

Iggy Pop selling car insurance. I guess you can’t put a price on irony.

Is it still a beginning when it’s the thousandth time you’ve begun?

There is a half written business plan on my laptop, which is waiting very patiently to become an ACTUALLY written business plan and to do more than just sit on my laptop. It is a rare thing for me to wander into the realm of the professional and grown-up, but here I am with my toe in the water and the temperature is very agreeable indeed. In an earlier blog, before my blogs had a website to appear on, I wrote a statement of intent that I would document the various stages I went through as I try to make a living as an artist and not just the guy in the office who does the least work. Three of these stages have happened within the last few weeks so I thought I’d better be true to my word and record them here, to give you a break from my usual endless pontificating about life, the universe and everything. I figure there’ll be time enough to bore you all with that later.

One of the reasons I merrily skip back to an office job everyday is not just because of the fulfilling work and excellent pay (!) but because I have flexibility over the amount of hours I put in. To be fair to the company, they have really been very understanding towards my needs. I told them upfront what my plans were and, in between pointing at me, whispering and sniggering, they have let me do what I asked and reduced my working week by the equivalent of a day – thereby giving me an allotted amount of painting hours and a financial target to hit to make up the shortfall in my wage. So lesson number one in pursuing your own venture is to make sure you are properly supported and to work for a company that doesn’t sack you the minute you express any interest in a life outside of that company. There are precious few in my experience, unless you can put together an awesome hamburger.

The next stage was the actual launch of this site. I needed a route to market and a permanent exhibition space and this site has given me both. I still don’t fully understand it and I nearly break it every time I load up an image. When I visit friends I wait for them to leave the room and then hurriedly get the website up on their computer to make sure it’s still there, as though it may slip down the back of the great internet settee if I’m not careful with it. Then I annoy everyone by talking about it all the time. Thinking about it, maybe don’t get a website, they turn you into an idiot.

As I mentioned earlier, stage number three is to have a business plan. It will help you understand that you have been selling your paintings for chump change for years and that you should’ve been a trillionaire by now. This will make you cry for a while but just keep reminding yourself that you’re Mummy’s special soldier and you’ll be alright. If your business plan is particularly good, it will tell you that it should have been written BEFORE you had a website and reduced the hours off your only source of income. Smart arse.

The last canvas I completed (‘One day something amazing will happen’) represents for me the end of a particular way of working and the start of a new one. I have been very fortunate in that I have been commissioned to do paintings or illustrations more or less constantly since I left University but I have nearly always had the content dictated to me by the buyer. I have had colour schemes picked for me because they match the curtains. I have had shapes recommended because they match the furniture. I have also been asked to do things that were absolutely beyond me, particularly portraits. Many years ago a lady commissioned me to paint a group of her friends enjoying a meal from a small photograph – a photograph that had managed to capture a great deal of nostalgia but almost no discernable detail. I copied it as best I could and made the image a bit larger but some of the faces had been turned into featureless masses by the camera and, as I had never met these people, I had to invent what wasn’t there. The lady was disappointed with the result and I was disappointed with the twenty five quid payment – so we were even. I haven’t painted portraits since.

Having the site and the time and a plan now means it is time for me to be true to the sort of images I really want to produce and to pursue the themes I am interested in. So when I say this is a new way of working I do not mean that from now on I will be snorting paint into my nostrils and sneezing on canvasses (seriously though, how cool would that be!) but worrying less about how ‘acceptable’ my paintings are. People can decide for themselves if they get it or not and if it’s worth parting with their hard earned cash and burning the curtains to have it on their living room walls. All I need now are some ideas. I check the mail everyday to see if they’ve arrived. Until they turn up I’ve been staring at the canvas that I painted flat turquoise three days ago and I’m still not sure what comes next. Actually, it’s brilliant. Not the turquoise, I meant that the feeling of uncertain and boundless freedom is brilliant. It’s brilliant because I am starting again for the thousandth time and yet it still feels like the one and only beginning – and beginnings are the best of things to be a part of.

I’m like the rubbish version of Batman. By day I’m a nobody office worker, peddling car insurance to the masses. By night I’m a nobody artist, painting out a dream that one day this will be all I do and who I am. Only that’s not how it goes at all. In reality, office work is mentally tiring and the days are long. At home at night you have to cook and eat and clean up and then claw back a little bit of life that is not about ‘productivity’ or ‘targets’. It seems I’ve got the tiniest proportion of time in which I can try to develop my hobby into something that pays gas bills and keeps the fridge full, but I’m too knackered when it comes. And I’m not alone. Most people you talk to have got some sort of brilliant skill or passion that they attempt to squeeze in around a job that does nothing to encourage their growth and a life that is full of distractions. I show people in my office my sketchbook and they go “Dude, you should totally be doing this for a living” (because people in Burnley talk like Californian surfers) and I think – how can I tell this person that I’ve been hearing this for the last ten years and done nothing about it but moan and feel cheated? Sound familiar? Then what the hell do we do?

My mate Rob built this site for me and during our planning sessions he suggested that I put more content into it than just the paintings; that I have something to hold the attention of the visitors and give them a reason to come back again. So I thought about this and I decided that as well as the usual stuff that appears in blogs, I wanted to have a specific aim, a continuous thread, something that people would find useful. And because I’m Batman I came up with two ideas.

When I was a Student and learning how to paint, I found that good advice and instructions were a bit thin on the ground. Like Magicians, Artists are a bit hesitant to tell you exactly how they do what they do, as with magic you have to look at the end product a lot and then work it out for yourself – mostly with depressing results. And if you’ve ever picked up a self-help book such as ‘How to draw animals pretty crappily’ or ‘How to paint portraits that will insult your models’, you’ll already know that these are a rubbish and boring alternative. They’ll give you the basics but following the steps will not make you Andy Warhol. Being Andy Warhol makes you Andy Warhol. But there’s my point, even Warhol took his inspiration from sources that were readily accessible to everyone, developed them in structured ways that could easily be taught and exhibited them via a bunch of connected people that he had been fortunate enough to meet, and people meet people all the time. (DISCLAIMER – becoming rich is another matter altogether, you cannot teach your audience to like your work. Rob a bank instead, the pay off is quicker and the critics are less harsh). So occasionally, for the studious and the curious alike, I’m going to drop the veil and tell you exactly how to do what I do from infantile sketch to finished canvas – warts and all. I promise it will be less boring and more valuable than ‘How to paint oxygen with watercolours’.

I don’t like peddling car insurance to the masses five days a week. I don’t even think the masses are that happy about me doing it. I also don’t like the fact that I have to fight to make time for my one real interest in life. I want to get out. So I’ve got a bit of a plan and it’s ready to roll and I’m going to document every single step of it here. That way if I make it, then I will have left behind a step by step guide to turning your hobby into your living. And if I don’t make it, then I will have shown you all the pitfalls, wrong turns and dead ends so you can avoid them and make better decisions than I did. I read about ordinary people realising their dreams and improving their lives all the time, mostly in trashy magazines in our staff canteen. So if it can be done then let’s get on with it. How hard can it be?