In my sixth interview in this series, I had a wide-ranging, utterly fascinating conversation with Jen Dixon.  She’s a full-time working artist and teacher, based in Cornwall, UK.

Shelley Skail: Hello and welcome! Now I realise this might be a tricky question because your body of work is so diverse. But… what inspires you?

Jen Dixon: I have a very busy brain. That’s genuinely all there is. It’s like a hoover for ingredients: colour, noises, shapes, movement, people, mostly fairly zoomed-in or macro looks at things. 

I’m not the kind of person who will look at a beautiful landscape and want to capture it as is. It doesn’t speak to me. It’s the nuances and the interesting things; the macro things of the moment, like a colour or a sound or a feeling like, is it cold? 

It’s definitely more about the details. So even if I do paint a landscape or something more figurative and representational, it’s typically not meant to just be that thing. I want to pull somebody in. 

I don’t like making what I would call ‘hotel art’. You know, the art that feels like it fills the space, but not a space in you. It just fills a bit of wall. 

I find that a lot of purely representational work doesn’t speak to me because I’m looking at something that could have been photographed, and that doesn’t move me. It’s interpretation that moves me. (Although, there are some photographers I truly love that do move me.)

That actually covers everything I do from the weird illustrations to the abstract work to the more representational stuff, the life drawing, all of that, every single thing that I do. It’s because I’m trying to capture those little things – the macros and the whole.

Literal representations are not typically exciting for me, but the details stick in my brain and then I can assemble them with other random information at random times. If I don’t draw it or paint it in that moment, I’ll email the idea to myself.

I email myself so much, especially in bed late when I have a thought. I learned the hard way that I will never remember these things otherwise – I’ve lost so many ideas to an inflated confidence in my memory. And if I have no paper, or words would take too long, I use the Notes app with my fingers as a stylus and make a scribble of whatever the thing is because sometimes it’s just easier to do it that way.

So that’s what inspires me – the details or the things you feel; little things you notice.

You mentioned that you’ve got a busy brain. I believe, from other things I’ve read of you, that you’ve got ADHD. Is that right?

Wizard-level ADHD! 

You’re catching me after the medicine has petered-out long ago in the day. Usually the medicine that I’m on starts petering out about 3:00 in the afternoon. I still do a lot of caffeine and things like that just to try and get through it. You’ll notice that I do a lot of moving around, so I’m definitely one of the ones with the hyperactivity component.

You know, that’s the one thing that I can think of that is the thread between all types of work that I do, because they are a bit… out there, but that also ties into the ADHD – I need to explore. I have so many ideas I can’t possibly get them all done in a lifetime, and sometimes it cripples me with how many ideas, and I get nothing done.

I hear that. I saw Dylan’s recent class on bullet journaling and in it she said, “if you’re a creative, you’ve got honorary ADHD”. I felt really seen because I’m fairly certain I absolutely do not have ADHD but in terms of that creative mind…

Yeah, absolutely! She’s totally right with the honorary ADHD. Yeah. You can have a badge or a…

Honourable mention?

Exactly. A club. We bring donuts on Wednesdays. It’s fine. [laughing]

[Laughing]

I think the creative brain is so tuned into nuance and aesthetics and things like that. And I think even if somebody doesn’t fancy themselves much of a designer, or maybe they deny that part of being a creative in themselves, or maybe they just have a very straight-laced job. But the way somebody looks at the world, or the way somebody might assemble their living room, or the way they put the food on a plate, there’s something creative in everybody. And then if you learn to listen to it a little bit more, and you maybe start creating, I think then the ideas oftentimes come thick and fast and from wildly different directions, especially if somebody is beginning [the creative journey]. Because how do you know what you like unless you’ve had a stab at it?

Absolutely! So this got me wondering; what do you feed your brain in terms of the sort of media or things like that that you let into your brain from the outside world?

I haven’t had a TV licence in years, so any time I watch anything like a movie or a non-live television show or a series or anything, it’s very deliberate. I don’t default into television and that sort of thing. We’ve got an Amazon Prime membership, which is fun, you know, just to have a rotating cast of films and television available if we want it.

But for the most part, I’m very deliberate about what I spend my time on, and then I’m absolutely queen at completely wasting the time. So it’s a tricky thing. I love music, and my tastes in music are pretty eclectic. I would say as eclectic as the kind of artworks that I create, my different creative avenues, everything from classical to punk to electronic to experimental.

And, I’m still very stuck in the nineties. I’m not going to lie, the nineties and early 2000s, that’s still my era. Wildly different things as far as music goes. 

But visually, I try not to look at other people’s work in a way that is comparative. I look at it because it can be easy to, and for a while I chased it comparatively as well. I know loads of people who’ll look at Instagram and they’ll start following some artists that do work that is kind of similar to what they’re doing, but maybe it’s a step further or step more developed than where that person is at that moment. And then their work starts emulating those others because they’re trying to figure out how do I level up to where that person that I admire is? 

What I found over the years of specifically looking at abstract work on Instagram is, like with anything else, (in design especially) there are trends and all of a sudden there’s a year, maybe a year and a half, of a specific kind of abstract work that is really popular and gets a lot of rotation on things like Instagram. I unfollowed loads of them because I realised it was more detrimental than beneficial, even if you have found your way (and I like to think over the past few years I’ve found my way more solidly than ever).

I think that if you can look at some artwork that you admire and deconstruct it, you try to look behind the curtain of it rather than just saying, Oh my God, those are so beautiful. I don’t even know how they can do that, that’s magic.

Think about it, deconstruct it, and then instead of emulating it, how do you learn from it and incorporate it into your work with your voice? You know, because you can usually distil things down to what I would say are more like principles of design, rather than saying: they use these specific colours in this specific way, start saying: okay, actually, what’s the visual contrast right now? Do they have a scratchy line with something very smooth next to it for that visual contrast? Because that’s something tangible that you can apply no matter what your medium is or whatever. 

[Laughing] Wait. So what was the question?

[Laughs] I like this answer, but I was asking about what you feed your brain.

I try not to feed my brain on things on Instagram anymore. And when you have ADHD, memory is sometimes spotty, and I’ve always downplayed or even trash-talked my own memory and my ability to remember things. So a lot of the things that I do, I am trying to actually pull something from the deep files in my brain. I send my little file clerk to the dusty drawers up there to pull out anecdotes, or situations, or something from the past, or whatever. And oftentimes that will trigger something.

Or I just start messing with colour, and paper is there to be used. I have – for a very long time – taught students in my studio or in workshops and told them “it’s only wasted paper if you don’t use it.”

Oh, I like that.

Dirty up as many sheets as possible! Get it on sale, buy it from school supply companies, get it in bulk anywhere you can so that you get a reasonable quality, but at a very economical price. Because if you can remove that hurdle, it’s incredibly freeing. And if you know you have reasonable quality, but not top-tier prices on things, I think there’s a real potential to break through that wall and that fear of the blank page. It’s one of the reasons why I switched to paper over canvas as my primary surface. It’s forgiving, it’s cheap, it’s plentiful, and it keeps up with my pace because I can have 16 pieces of paper going at the same time with the same colour palette.  And I can try all the ideas, and I think that’s it! when something works. So make crap. Use a lot of paper.

Yes! 

Now, you were talking about Instagram and not using that to feed your brain. When I have asked other people about who their favourite artists are, they are often people on Instagram.

Mine are all in books and they’re all dead.

I think it’s that tangible thing, that thing where I can look and very nearly touch one of these creations. I’m the person that goes up and gets really close in a museum to the point where I almost trip the alarms because I’m looking at what “that guy” didn’t do. Seeing that he’s got flaws in his oil painting, going “there’s a problem! And look at all that cracking”. Flaws are great.

And we’ve been sort of nurtured and raised and pushed in perfectionist directions by everything from Artists and Illustrators Magazine etc., the whole lot of them, they’re all about, let’s build you up. And this is the proper way to do this and this is the proper way to do that. But I think you need room to experiment, beyond foundations, to screw up too.

For example, Willem de Kooning – there are chemical analysis books written about his work because he would use Wesson cooking oil as an oil in his paintings.

And you would never catch anyone in an art supply company or a magazine saying, you know what you’ve got in the kitchen – that’ll do, stick it in your oil paint. It’s fine. 

But that’s just it – there are so many flaws in the Masters and the artists who we revere, but we so very often only see a photograph. There’s a screen between us and that work, but if you have somewhere you can go and see the work in person, to see scribbled-out drawings in Picasso’s sketchbook right there in front of you, you will learn more at that moment than you ever learn on somebody’s Instagram grid. 

There are – thankfully – a lot of people out there, and I try to do it as much as I can, who show warts and all in their Instagram feeds. I appreciate that reality, and I appreciate that experience of their work. So my top artists are not typically on Instagram.

Who are your top artists?

That’s actually a complicated question. Some artists are really problematic personalities seen with modern eyes, and also it’s hard to choose without categorising, like: women artists, figurative or abstract, alive or dead? Were they influential from my childhood? So, I guess this is me weaselling out of the question a bit [laughing], but I will answer with some actual names.

If I were to pick artists based purely on output and work ethic – these are people that I admire for those qualities as well as I dig what they do. Jean Michel Basquiat. Pablo Picasso. Andy Warhol. Three very different artists but incredible producers. And they tried lots of things. 

When I was a child in the seventies, I learned about Andy Warhol’s Factory studio. I was very small when I learned about that. And the idea of having this (romanticised now, of course), but the idea of a big converted warehouse space, big brick building, that is still the dream romance thing.

And thinking that there was this place, he called it the Factory, and cool people showed up, and they made movies, and they did screen prints, and they just had a great time being creative. That was instrumental in me wanting to pursue art. I wanted my own Factory.

Also, other artists that I admire for their output: Joan Mitchell, Egon Schiele, Francis Bacon, Keith Haring. Wildly different and there are so many other artists, and so many other styles. 

I realise I only named dead artists. If you were to check my bookcase, you would see a broad range. I think it points to early abstraction as a favourite period, and onwards up to now. And it’s not that I don’t appreciate the old masters, but they just don’t do it for me.

Yeah, I think there’s got to be that element of you being moved by it in some way.

Absolutely. I’ll learn about Caravaggio, I’ll learn about Rembrandt. I’ll figure them out. You know, what makes them what they are? Why are they enigmatic, or why do people admire that work?

But you know what? It doesn’t typically do it for me, and that’s fine.

What is your favourite piece of your own art?

That’s also really difficult!

It’s a tough one because I’m a multi-disciplinary artist: I work in lots of different mediums and lots of different styles. I made a breakthrough a few years ago with graffiti marker illustration, so graffiti marker illustration style on big paper. And that marries with my love of weird humour and writing.

Strange characters that would normally only occupy my head or a random sketchbook page- I’m getting them out finally. It’s almost like I’ve just been able to open the box. And it wasn’t until I got these great big markers on a whim. They opened up something that I hadn’t truly figured out how to bring into the world yet.

So I really love the works that I do like that which are in the grey area between creepy and cute. Sometimes I tell stories through them, or sometimes the illustration ends up being just a snapshot in time.

Of my abstract work, I create them in lots of different mediums too. I like my most uncluttered works best because I do tend to go crazy and overwork a piece. That’s what all that other paper’s for: I can do iterations, I can do versions, I can do a whole series. I can turn it into a triptych. It doesn’t matter. But when I have been so mindful to show a bit of restraint and keep a little mystery, and not try to lift every stone while I’m doing the piece, the pieces that I’ve done where I’ve managed to keep them fairly simple, I like them best. 

That carries over to the work on paper too. Typically, it’s the less busy things that I like best.

I have some figurative favourites too. I was a life drawing teacher for nearly four years, weekly classes with a big group of people. I loved figuring out how to take 3D into 2D and problem-solving the angles and the perspective. I love that!  

I also love the painting I created from a time when I was my mom’s hospice carer. I was her 24-hour hospice carer. She’d hate that I painted her like that, but she’s dead and she’ll never know. But I found it cathartic and really important to do. 

That’s really powerful.

It was a strange one. I did an abstract painting of the black, airline-approved plastic rectangle box container thing that I brought her ashes over in. So I’ve got a very stark painting of that. 

And then I’ve got this (almost Renaissance style in its jewel tones) painting of her on her deathbed and they both needed to come out for different reasons.

I’m really pleased that I did it. Even though she would have hated it. I had a really good relationship with my mom. And yeah, she had a dark humour streak too.

I’m sorry that you lost her.

Oh, thank you. It was an impactful time. I have the utmost admiration for anyone who takes on end-of-life care as a career option because it is haunting stuff. 

I ended up documenting her entire death process. I had an iPhone 3 at the time, this was back in 2010, and because I don’t have a lot of faith in my own memory – I don’t remember the death of my father very well (that was many, many years earlier).

But I did not want to lose this moment. I didn’t want to lose my memories of the time, and I didn’t want to miss out on processing it. And so I photographed the entire thing surreptitiously. I’ve got some incredibly beautiful photos of my mother in the final month and a half we had, and I made a coffee table book out of it, and wrote my experience through it. But the paintings do a different service in that kind of grieving. 

I think art can serve an important role in processing experience, particularly profound experiences like this. It makes sense to me that those pieces could be some of your favourites. 

Could you tell me about your current labour of love or project?

I don’t have anything that I would announce because every time I tried to announce my next class coming out or something like that, life just manages to bulldoze those deadlines and put every obstacle you can imagine in my way. So I don’t do that anymore because it always backfires. So, no, I have nothing going on. Nothing. But at the same time, I’m doing lots of things.

I’m building a couple of web shops, and I have an enormous to-do list, all about diversifying my business because I’m at that point in my career where I’ve focused really heavily on a couple of spokes on the wheel, and now it’s time to start bringing in those other spokes. So I do have a lot of things going on, but I’m not going to tell you anything about them because I’m not going to have them jinxed [laughing].

[Laughing] This is like a curse.

It is! But I can sort of tell you some high-level stuff. So if we’re not talking about my typical art-making, I’ve got some projects in development but that’s not unusual. Finishing them is another matter, especially with my wizard-level ADHD… I mean, I have classes that I film and publish online and that marries my love of teaching art with my geeky tech side.

I also have various types of books that I want to write dealing with art techniques, as well as children’s books. And also some weird art books of my illustrations, ideas that I had for some of my characters. So, those are not necessarily children’s books, but a bit more on the weird side. Zines like, but with hard covers, maybe don’t know. But the kind of things that I hope will be looked at as a work of art with pages. It’s strange to try and put a definition on it, but loads of that kind of thing going on.

I’m also hoping I can make time to learn hand poke tattooing over the winter. I have all the kit for it; just need to make the time.

And various series that I want to complete with artworks.

So a labour of love… I think high-level, that is just getting through some of the ideas I have, because I have far more than I will ever manage to produce. I can never complete my lifes’ work – it should be spread over a few lifetimes.  My brain just doesn’t stop.

So what is a day in your life and your brain like?

My brain feels like what a flip book looks like. You know the little animation where you just have to draw something that changes very slightly from page to page, and there are these chubby little books. That’s kind of what this is like and it just feels like, that or those old-fashioned Victorian entertainment things where it’s like a horse on a round carousel or something, and you would see it flickering, the Zoetrope. It feels like everything is firing all at once, all the time, and it just does so a little bit less when the medication is active. 

I wake up around eight, I have a light breakfast, get a strong black coffee. I flip between email accounts, check in on Slack, check comments and questions overnight from various social media avenues, classes, and then I dig into whatever is screaming loudest on my to-do list.

I’m a work-in-progress when it comes to organisational processes, so I’m always iterating with what system is going to work a little bit better with my brain. Right now I’m trying to adapt and adopt a version of the Eisenhower Matrix. The urgent/important thing, and I’m having varying degrees of success with that, but I think it’s helping. I also have a big self-styled planner. I have mostly designed all my own planner pages to work with my brain, and they incorporate things like the Pomodoro Technique, but they don’t have things like gratitude corners or anything because that doesn’t have any business in what I need to do that day. I need something that just keeps me on track and doesn’t have motivational stuff in it.

I need the lion tamer with his chair and his whip, don’t I? [Laughing] I try to be understanding with my brain and flexible. And I don’t beat myself up anymore because it’s easy for all kinds of brains to get into a punishment cycle. Like, if you don’t feel like you got enough done during the day, you stay at work late. Your output will always be rubbish though, because you’re in punishment mode then. And you’re trying to play catch up when actually you should just go and get some rest, have some downtime, put on a film, you know, let it go. 

And chances are, with most of us who work either majority freelance or completely for ourselves, nobody else knows the deadlines. Give yourself a break. If somebody is not actually hounding you for something on a contract, especially in these last few years, everybody’s got some wiggle room.

Everybody’s got some compassion for the most part. So I try to do that. I kind of grab whatever is screaming loudest on the to-do list. I’m always iterating to make my systems a little bit better, but I also spend most of my time in this room, in my studio, which is also my office. It’s my editing station, it’s my comfort cave.

I grew up an only child in a room surrounded with my favourite knick-knacks and things and art supplies. So it feels very natural to me. Every day’s a potential workday or potentially a play day, and I try not to worry about it too much.

But I have the luxury of my lifestyle. I have the luxury of being able to do that with the flexibility of my schedule. It was a very different scene when I actually had bosses.

Now you are your boss.

Exactly. And sometimes I’m terrible. I’m a mean boss and sometimes I’m an “I have no idea what I’m doing” kind of boss.

Do you have times in which you’re definitely working and times when you’re not? 

No. I try to be in a fairly compatible schedule with other people, as in, I try to be available during daylight hours because that’s when most people make appointments and do things like that. But I regularly find myself in the studio way too late. No one else in the house is awake and I’ve been watching a film, or have got stuck down a rabbit hole on something I want to learn.

And it can be 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. I’m putting all the lights out, and I walk past a blank sheet of paper on my easel, and I have to stop because something has come to me. And if I don’t capture it in that moment, I won’t. And so the materials come out and a light goes on and paint gets splashed around.

I’d love to have the discipline, but also I kind of like the wild ideas time because it feels very uninhibited and necessary. It has a need, like daytime hours never seem to have. Like an urgency, an urgency of meeting a fleeting moment. And if I don’t grab the dragon at that moment and fly away with it, then I’ll make a note and try to go to bed. But most of the time I just stay and let it happen.

I suffer for it the next day, though, I tell you! The coffee – I just wallow in it. I just fill a kiddie pool with coffee and –

– Like Cleopatra and her milk? 

Yes. So. Much. Coffee.

So that’s kind of a day in my life. And it doesn’t sound like much in some ways, but it does it for me.

For my next question, can you finish this: if you really knew me, you’d know …

I have no idea! 

I’m a big uber sharer, so basically I have a few very dear friends who could answer way better than I ever could because I have no objectivity when it comes to this. And I don’t assume anyone knows anything about me because I forget so many things in my life with the way my brain is wired.

But I’m an open book. I’m an oversharer. I mean, I could say something really boring like, if you really knew me, you’d know I haven’t eaten the flesh of something with lungs since I don’t know when. My mid-twenties, I guess. (I’m pescatarian; fish don’t have lungs.)

I was trying to figure out what animal that excluded.

Yeah. I don’t think technically fish have lungs. They definitely don’t have feet, that much I know.

But yeah, it’s like I can say something really boring like that. But I mean I’ve had an interesting life so far. I’ll be 51 in January.

No way!

Yes! I was born in 72. I’ve had a really interesting life so far, with various things that I’ve done. So, I have no idea what anybody knows about me, but chances are they know a lot because I share.

Now, this is my favourite question. What’s your favourite joke?

I know precisely one joke. And it’s a statement more than a traditional joke.
Okay: Two snowmen in a field. 

One asks the other, do you smell carrots? 

[Laughing] I love it.

I don’t even remember where I picked that up. But it was a bunch of years ago. And I feel really bad because I have a feeling somebody I know actually wrote it because I knew some comedians for a while.  But I have no way to attribute it because I don’t remember. But whoever they are, I hope they forgive me.

Well, if my blog becomes super famous and the originator of that joke reads it then they can let me know and I’ll absolutely attribute them.

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You can see more of Jen’s art on Instagram. She’ll also have an online shop soon at her website https://www.jendixon.com/ where you can buy her stuff. You can also find her on Skillshare where she teaches mostly art and art practice skills to bring into your work.

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If you enjoyed this interview with Jen Dixon, you might enjoy my earlier interviews with

• Françoise Blayac
• Simone Michiels
• Elise Aabakken
• Vicky Jeffery and
• Taylor Carroll