Actions often speak louder than words.
And in a similar sense, picture books are much easier to read than regular ones, since you don’t have to read them at all.
There I was, an eighteen-year-old Fine Art Diploma student, borrowing old books about Banksy from the school library.
The computer room on campus was pretentiously filled with giant, flat-screened Apple Macs that had Windows operating systems installed on them.
It was there that people could get a gist of what other fine art students were creating, or planning to create – it’s difficult to hide your ideas when they’re illuminated in a small room within a tight circle of 23-inch monitors.
It was a good place to “network” as a student.
Studying Banksy naturally lent itself to creating an alias for myself, as a then-stencil-graffiti artist.
“I’m gonna call myself Matsby and go out and spray paint walls around the city,” I jokingly proclaimed to the other students.
One girl laughed.
The Macbooks glowed with appreciation at my statement.
–
Right after graduating from Bourneville School of Art in 2014, I sold two of the stencil graffiti paintings I submitted (late) for my final exam at a local auctioneers.
One of them was a painting of Julie Andrews and the children from The Sound Of Music running gleefully towards a giant plasma television.
The other one was a painting of Benedict Cumberbatch handing Chiwetel Ejiofor a bright red bucket of KFC.
The head of the auction house bought the latter painting for himself.
It was a nice moment for me.
But after that, I struggled with art.
I struggled to focus on making the art I wanted to make.
I struggled to understand what the art I actually wanted to make was.
I struggled to make money from the art that I was making.
Five very depressing years of that struggle passed me by.
–
In the summer of 2019, I turned 24.
I was a failure, on my way to the Prince’s Trust for help as a stereotypical “lost young person” looking for work.
I got into a scheme called “Get Into Events With Crewsaders” that summer, and got hired as an events crewman, setting up and taking down exhibitions for big business shows at places like the NEC in Birmingham, UK.
It was there I learned three things –
- “Ask for help”
- “Look like you’re busy.”
- “Stop second-guessing yourself.”
The company was essentially named after wars, and like soldiers, the work was physically rough and straining.
My colleagues were rougher than I was – they were the kind of guys who watch sports, talk trash on you behind your back, and curse a lot.
Strangely, I liked them – but I didn’t fit in at all, and was fired after 5 months.
I immediately spent the money I’d made working that job on a trip to Qatar and Thailand, where I got my first taste of a love for Asia.
When I returned to England, I got a job with Uber Eats as a bicycle-riding fast-food delivery guy.
I did that while completing a digital illustration course on Udemy during lockdown.
I wanted to be able to draw manga characters, but was pretty slow at it, and didn’t get very far.
Speed has always been an issue for me.
I eventually had to quit Uber Eats due to physical exhaustion, and miraculously found immediate work as a copywriter.
One of my writing clients was LUNA PR, a Web3 public relations agency in Dubai.
Its working culture and my colleagues were very different from that of Crewsaders.
Back then, LUNA PR mostly consisted of beautiful and intelligent women who specialised in the promotion of decentralised finance projects.
It was early 2021 – crypto, blockchain and NFTs were creating hype in a booming new industry.
Writing about cryptocurrencies was a steep learning curve, but the company liked my work.
Soon enough, I understood the world of blockchain very well – and how it crossed over into the art collection world.
But I still found corporate jargon confusing.
Whenever one of my colleagues would ask me how my “bandwidth” was, I’d reply to her with a screenshot of an Mbps Internet Speed Test from Fast.com.
This happened multiple times (she never replied).
This job showed me that I was a storyteller, but I grew tired of writing the same old promotional articles over and over, and my eyes were hurting from the strain.
So I moved on from copywriting to try my hand at interviewing artists, business owners and creatives in person, rather than just writing about them for crypto and NFT project articles.
Interestingly, I used to get through writing those articles by listening to somewhat viral, specially-curated vaporwave mixes on YouTube by a mysterious persona known as Macroblank.
Vaporwave is known as “the first musical genre born on the internet” – at least, that was what I was told on the night I interviewed Macroblank.
On 4th February 2023, I met him in Hackney, London – at an event called “Barber Night Delight” – a unique live musical occasion dedicated to an offshoot of vaporwave that had been coined as “Barber Beats.”
I put the interview up on YouTube, and it did fairly well.
Reflecting on that night, I remembered talking to people at the show about how Macroblank names his curations in Japanese.
I didn’t realise I’d be working with this language myself, later down the line.
I actually didn’t significantly encounter Japanese art again until returning from a second trip to Thailand in 2025.
I’d just spent 9 months there, teaching Thai primary school children English.
It was there I learned three things –
- Small, daily positive interactions are more healing than we give them credit for.
- Prepare for the worst case scenario possible.
- Stop lying to yourself about what you want.
I’d previously met a young rap artist known as SBK at a creative networking event for music artists in London.
At that time, I was shooting the evening for a creative collective of artists from Birmingham called 93:00.
Anyhow, SBK had begun posting vlogs of his recent travels around Asia.
Like me, he’d just been travelling in Thailand.
But rather than return to England, he’d moved on to Japan.
In his photos from the trip, I saw what looked like a shop window filled with, well…
…calligraphic visual elegance.
They were boxes of snacks – small, colourful, slender cardboard boxes branded with logos and text.
But they were so iconic-looking you’d hardly know there was food inside – unless you could read Japanese.
But something then was pulling at my heart.
Japanese writing was so beautiful.
But what would I do about it?
What could I do about it?
Well – I began a conversation with Chat GPT about Japanese Kanji.
The first question I asked it was,
“what mistakes do foreigners make when choosing kanji for personal artwork?”
This conversation went on for weeks –
Wow, how this language runs deep.
So, I carefully chose my kanji.
I cut my stencil, just as I had done while studying Banksy at art school all those years ago.
And I started painting again.
