Refilling the Creative Cup with Mark Clay

Creativity and community.

Mark Clay's transition into the arts began later in life, sparked by his experiences as a father. He initially engaged in creative activities to facilitate his daughters' artistic explorations, which led him to rediscover his own potential for drawing. This rekindling of creativity served as a form of 'occupational therapy', allowing him to refill his emotional cup during a stressful period in his life. 

Mark's involvement in community activities, such as volunteering at the Hinksey Heights Nature Trail, further enriches his creative life. He notes that engaging with nature and working alongside others has inspired his artwork. This connection to nature and community not only enhances his artistic practice but also fosters a sense of belonging and purpose.

Mark has embraced a slow, contemplative approach to his art, which allows him to produce pieces that resonate with his experiences and emotions. His journey illustrates that artistic development is not just about technical skill but also about understanding oneself and the world, resulting in a richer and more rewarding creative life.

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Researched, edited and produced by Claire Waite Brown
Music: Day Trips by Ketsa Undercover / Ketsa Creative Commons License Free Music Archive - Ketsa - Day Trips
Artworks: Emily Portnoi emilyportnoi.co.uk
Photo: Ella Pallet

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And it rapidly dawned on me that it was a terrible idea. I wasn't happy. A lot of the time I just felt I was being paid to have arguments for people. So in so much as I had a plan, it wasn't a very good one. I need to think about what I want to do. Do I still want to do at the age of 45 what I decided to embark upon at the age of 25? And the answer really was that I wanted to do something more creative. I found that the creativity was a way to kind of refill my cup, if you like. It's a kind of occupational therapy, really, and lots of artists talk about how art plays that role for them. I've used that to help me come to terms with the grief. It doesn't take the grief away by any means, I can tell you that, but it's sort of helped me put a shape to it. It's a very delicate thing for me, my art, and I want to hold it very carefully. It's quite fragile. Hi, I'm Claire, founder of Creativity Found, a community for creative learners and educators, connecting adults who want to find a creative outlet with the artists and crafters who can help them do so with workshops, courses, online events and kits. For this podcast, I chat with people who have found or re-found their creativity as adults. We'll explore their childhood experiences of the arts, discuss how they came to the artistic practices they now love, and consider the barriers they may have experienced between the two. We'll also explore what it is that people value and gain from their newfound artistic pursuits, and how their creative lives enrich their practical, necessary, everyday lives. For this episode, I'm chatting with Mark Clay. Hello, Mark. How are you? Hello, Claire. I'm very well. Thanks so much for inviting me You're very welcome. Start by telling me how you tap into your creativity currently. Well, I am 54 years old. I've been an artist for about 10 years. I live in Oxford with my wife and my two very talented creative daughters and my very talented creative wife and I do all sorts of things as an artist. I'm primarily a drawing artist but I do sculpture and textile things. I help to run the bobbly life drawing group i'm a member of the oxford art society and i help to organize exhibitions there i'm also a member of a group of artistic colleagues and friends called portable. And the other aspects of my creative life is nothing to do really with with art although it does inspire is i'm also a volunteer on the hinksey heights nature trail which is just outside oxford so there are many strings to my artistic Brilliant. That's all very community-minded. It's not just the drawing, it's actually taking part in the art community and then in the nature community. Brilliant. Tell me, when you were younger, what were your creative experiences At school, I was primarily interested in the performing arts. so i did music a lot of music as a child and through to my university years i played the clarinet and i learned the piano and i was in orchestras and bands i did school reviews and plays i was in a boys grammar school so my voice broke very late and slowly so i attempted to get a lot of the girl parts So it was really performing arts that I was interested in then. I was quite a shy boy, so doing things like that really helped me come out of my shell a bit as I got into my teenage years and beyond. By the time I went to university, which I did in Leeds and studied English, I was doing musical things pretty much every night, playing in wind bands, orchestras, singing in choirs. I was in a German umpire band for a short time. I've always enjoyed the community aspect Yeah, that's becoming more and more apparent. You said you studied English at university. Did Not really. I didn't really know what I wanted to be. All I knew was that I enjoyed English. I enjoyed literature and reading. I still do. And I enjoyed the sort of the analysis and the debate and the things around that as well. After university, I went to law school for two years and I was halfway through what was called article clerkship in those days. I was about a year away from qualifying to be a solicitor. And it rapidly dawned on me that it was a terrible idea i wasn't happy it didn't give me any sort of creative. You know i love the time i just felt i was being paid to have arguments for people. So in so much as i had a plan it wasn't a very good one so after after a year of my two year article clark ship i went off and did something completely different. I joined opera north the opera company based in legion yorkshire which is where i was living again as an entry level fundraiser and i ended up doing that for twenty five years not entirely opera north but that became my career so i had two bites of the cherry and i'm happy to say that the second bite of the cherry was much more to my taste in the first bite lasted a bit longer. Do you remember why Yeah, I enjoyed studying law as an academic subject, debating the ins and outs of cases and how laws are applied in particular circumstances and so on. I enjoyed that aspect. I was quite an academic young man. But in terms of practicing it as a job, as a business, it's a business. I was working for a firm that was representing a company that was suing another company for compensation for the supply of £8 million worth of faulty bottle tops. I remember sitting in this meeting and i was just sitting in the corner i was a minion taking notes for the people who were doing the negotiations and they know they were getting really cross about these bottle tops you know it's a lot of money eight million pounds and i remember sitting there thinking, I don't want to do this for the rest of my life. This is bonkers. So I ran away to join the opera. I wanted to do something that meant more to me personally than arguing about somebody's bottle tops. And I really landed on my feet with that job. I love opera. I love music. I've been a music fan for far longer And what does What does working in fundraising actually mean? So like how did you start? What were you doing when you started and how Well I've always worked largely for either for higher education or for registered charities. So registered charities for example will be looking to boost their income so they can do their charitable work whatever that might be. So you know arts organisations are charities as well. So I was helping Opera North raise the money Did it needed every year to put on the opera's in the concerts in the education programs and it did so for us there it meant selling things like corporate entertainment packages applying to travel trust for funding for education projects asking individuals for donations in one way or another or at all different sizes and at the heart of all of that. Is building relationships with people you're building relationships with people on behalf of your chosen employer cause. Help you know help them feel like they're part of it and to help them feel that they're doing something to support that charity that means something to me one way or another. And that's what i did when you first started the entry level you're doing all sorts of things you're learning all different ways of doing fundraising and it is quite a creative. Job which is probably why i stuck with it so for so long. But as you progress through your fundraising career you start to specialize in different forms of fundraising and that's what i did so after i was at opera north i went to london to work for a couple of major young people's charities. And then i met my wife and got married and we moved to oxford so i worked helping oxford brooks university do fundraising for a few years and then i moved to join oxford university where i worked for the best part of eight years after that i was head of fundraising for a charity in alesbury and wendover called pace. Wonderful charity and. Buy this point i was in my mid forties and i was responsible for teams raising millions of pounds worth of money a year, managing people managing relationships and all that kind of thing so i done the conventional career thing. I'd work my way up, you know, I was going grey, I was getting older, I was working every hour that God sent me. And that three years of pace was in many respects the best job I've ever had in terms of what I was doing and what I was able to achieve for an amazing charity working with kids with cerebral palsy and neurological conditions. But by that point, I've been doing it for a long time. I was starting to feel a kind of certain repetitiveness about it. So at this point, I was in my mid 40s. I was 44, 45. And people sometimes call it a midlife crisis. That's quite a negative way to describe it. And i should mention it is quite difficult for some people but actually i felt like it was a really important and valuable thing to have in my life news at that point that i sat down and said to myself what i need to, i need to think about what i want to do do i still want to do at the age of forty five what i decided to embark upon at the age of twenty five. And the answer really was that i wanted to do something more creative that's ten years ago now more or less and that's that's the part that leads Just a shout out for Aylesbury and Wendover there. I was just talking with Mark before I pressed record and we're both in Oxford now but I went to school in Aylesbury and lived in Wendover. But going back then, is this the point that you pick up a pencil? Was there another point that you picked up a pencil and it fed into this midlife change? Tell me a bit about how that all Yeah, I didn't study art at school at all, the visual arts at all. The art teacher at my school, very unlikely, if you still with us that he would remember me in the slightest but i did do a level because that's how old i am in graphical communication which was essentially technical drawing with a little bit of graphic design in it as well i don't remember the term being used back in those days. I did my own levels in nineteen eighty six which is a terrifying thought and i wanted to be an architect for a little while. One of my other teacher said to me you haven't got the math. I never was very good at math so i didn't go down that route in the end but i did really enjoy doing graphical communication. So i knew i could draw but i never did anything with it you know until what thirty years later. Pop from the old game of pictionary where i fancy myself as a bit of a player i didn't do any drawing but i sort of knew i had this potential so. There was this little seed that was in me from a long time ago that i'd not really looked at me not when i was going through my life review if we want to call it that i was thinking about doing all sorts of things i thought i might be a writer. Because of my english background dabbled with that not very successfully i thought about taking up the banjo at one point so you can be thankful that i didn't go down that direction either. So the real thing that set the drawing and art hair running was having children. My two daughters and rose loved as all kids do rt crafty making sort of things you know they have this real joy and enthusiasm at that age we all do that sort of thing and it's the sort of things you do with your kids when they're really young so at the start of it i was just helping to facilitate them. Jump modeling drawing silly pictures sticking things together that sort of thing. I'm getting pleasure from that pleasure but then as i was getting into it and realizing until helping them to explore their artistic enthusiasm i suddenly realized at some point it was. It was good for me as well. So this is the point of which i was the head of fundraising and you know working really hard a bit stressed out feeling a bit tired feeling i was over extending myself and i needed to do something for me. So a very wise friend of mine, my friend Martin, who I've known since I was at school, he said to me, you can't pour from an empty cup. And that's how I felt. And I found that the creativity was a way to kind of refill my cup, if you like. It's a kind of occupational therapy, really. And lots of artists talk about how art plays that role for them. Lots of people do, I think. So I decided that it could be a little gift to myself. So i started drawing silly pictures to make them laugh i still do they think my jokes are fairly terrible these days i started doing things for myself. Yeah i feel sketchbooks with terrible things that i'm very fond of what i look back now i think mark is awful. But that's but that's the journey you put yourself on and it was a gift to me and in the year twenty fifteen we went on holiday to northern spain and i decided more or less on a whim that the whole family was going to do some drawing so i went to. The works or something like that i bought some cheap pencils and notebooks. Set right we're all going to do some drawing on this holiday and so we did. It sort of fell by the wayside as we got through the holiday, except for me. I kept going and I've never really stopped since. The first thing I drew was a yucca plant. I have no idea why, but it just gave me so much pleasure that I thought I'm The yucca must have drawn you to it and that's One of the things I also did before the art caught me to give myself a break from work was I would go walking with my friend Martin again in the Lake District. So I love, I love being outdoors in mountains and hills and all that sort of thing. And I did do quite a lot of drawings of the Lake District in the early days because it was a way of being there when I couldn't actually be physically there. Yeah, and I've always enjoyed being outdoors and the nature trail has inspired me hugely. There's a drawing on the wall behind me right now, which is inspired by the nature trail. Yeah. And you, and I think having, from what you said already, this is the academic in you, you actually took it further, didn't you, within an educational capacity? So having filled a few sketchbooks with drawings for a couple of years, the first thing I looked at doing, I did a diploma in art and design and that was a year's course. So I left my job, I went part-time as a fundraiser, It was perfect for me i could cycle there in ten minutes it was one year course i can have a little go at everything and i thought i'll give it a go this is this is my gift to me. I'll see what happens you know maybe i'll i'll scratch the itch and decide that that's me sorted and done and go back to you know what my pension advisor calls a proper job. What would i would it be the beginning of something more on course once i started was never going to stop. So i done that year loved every minute of it and then two years later i went to Oxford brooks university to do the masters in fine art which i can i did two years part time. I'm quite an obsessive personality, so if I get into something, I really want to delve into it. This is why I've ended up doing drawings that take me 96 hours, is because I really enjoy the deep dive. If I'm passionate about something, I want to know deeply about it. So the MFA, which you get put through the mill intellectually and technically, and it's really challenging. There are days when you read a text and you think, I'm never going to understand this in a million years. i really enjoyed the challenge of that i came out a very very different artist still not finished article i mean i don't consider myself a finished article by any by any means i came out of the mfa in twenty twenty so we were right in the thick of covid we lost our summer show that year because because of covid the university closed down it was all done online But i still had a marvelous experience and i felt still felt hungry and wanted to carry on i carried on doing a bit more fundraising and i ended up doing some consultancy for a couple of years i've taken the decision as an artist that i will work as an artist alongside a part time. job that's the way i decided to balance things that works best for me and works best for my family and certainly best for us in financial terms i have actually stopped fundraising now i'm no longer a professional fundraiser i just i have a i work for a lovely charity in oxford called yellow submarine which works with kids and adults with learning disabilities and autism and i just do administration jobs but i do a little bit of everything there and that gives me a bit of a balance I do occasionally wonder about going full time as an artist, but I love my job so much. It's a funny thing, isn't it? There's me thinking that art would be a sort of cure for a career, but now it's different. I found a job that I really love working with people that I really love for a cause that I really am committed to, and my art Yeah, and alongside the volunteering at the nature trail as well, so you get your outside. This sounds mean, but you know I'm not being mean. When you mention working on a piece for 96 hours, I tend to think that making art your full-time job might not be the most lucrative. Tell me about this length of working and how you work I'm a real pencil addict. I love drawing. It'll always be the sort of wellspring of my work. One of my friends calls me the Oxford pencil shortage. When I get the bit between my teeth and I'm working on a drawing, I do get through a lot So when we have no pencils, when we go to the art shop and there's no Mark's working on another one. Yeah, I mean, I find that the way I'm happiest as an artist is slowing down. I've had a tendency in my life to live life at 100 miles an hour. When I was at law school, my colleagues used to call me Dasher because I was always legging it off to something. And I realized that what I really would benefit from was slowing down. When I get myself into the frame of mind where I'm working for that length of time on one drawing, what really pulls me in is the kind of absorbingness and the peacefulness and the silence of it. We live life at 100 miles an hour. We're always dashing on to the next thing, aren't we? And I felt that working in this different way was the best way for me as an artist. And it gives me space to think. When you're drawing for that long i mean i get into my studio and i got some music on in the background and i'm thinking about what i'm doing and i'm learning something about myself as an artist and also as a person as well i'm thinking about the things that are meaningful and important to me. I suppose i'm quite selfish in that sense as an artist i do things that are really really slow and absorbing for me and it keeps me out of trouble and makes me very happy. I mean you're absolutely right to say that being an artist is not necessary a lucrative profession and because i work in the way i do i don't put out huge amounts of work because i can't possibly. Working in that way i do a dozen pieces a year i'm happy. That is my way of being an artist it's kind of very slow and cumulative i can do things quickly if i need to i do do commissions occasionally but i don't chase them. So that's slowing down is really valuable for me. It will be very easy for me to get obsessed about my art as a career in the same way as i got obsessed and overextended in my my working life as a fundraiser i would i often took on more than i should i made myself very tired and very you know very stressed out at times i don't want to do that with my art. It's a very. It's a very delicate thing for me, my art, and I want to hold it very carefully. It's quite fragile, I think, and very precious to me. I don't do huge numbers of exhibitions or sales. I do do those things, but I And that's another question actually about feeling ready to. I really love the slowing down and everything that surrounds the actual process for you as a person, but can you switch on? Like, can you just go, right, I'm going into the studio. This is my time for doing this. Or do you need to go, I've got the urge. I now need to go and do my draw. I'm sure lots of artists have said this to you already, Claire. It's not the kind of thing where you can't just turn on the tap. You have to be in the right frame of mind. Because of the way my life is organized and how my art fits into it, I have to make a lot of compromises. I have a lot of obligations to my job and my wife and my children and my friends and to the trail. So there's a lot of compromise involved. And yes, there are days when you go into the studio and think, right, I've got a whole Friday to do something amazing. And then within half an hour, you think, actually, I've got nothing today. I'm going to go and mow the lawn. And it's very hard for it to be directed and manageable in that sort of consistent way. And I don't know whether I have any answers for anyone on how to get round to that. But one of the things that has worked for me is because my art relates so personally to aspects of my life, particularly the trail at the moment, but other things as well, I find it means that I'm aware of my art when I'm out doing something else. So if i'm what work with yellow submarine i'm in a session with some of the some of the members there as we call them i'm sometimes thinking about how i could turn this into an art shop workshop for them down the road, if i'm out on the trail i'm always on the alert on the alert and aware of how something i'm doing or something i'm seeing or hearing that day can turn into art. So even if i'm not sitting in my studio trying to squeeze art out of myself as it were i'm aware of the potential for art to come and grab me. When i'm out and about is a lovely phrase isn't there by picasso he said inspiration has to find you working. And I find that if I'm out on the trail, I often think, oh, I could do an artsy thing with that. And I come back from the trail with lumps of wire and bits of old rotting wood. And my wife just rolls her eyes. And six months down the line, I'll either throw it away or turn it into an artwork. So, yeah, being aware of how your art can come to you and being open to that. is the way I find it helps me. It helps me to be inspired rather than sitting down and trying to Yeah, yeah, no, I completely understand that. Tell me a So not far from where I live on the edges of Oxford is the Hinksey Heights Nature Trail. And in the Covid lockdown, an appeal came out from the landowners to say we need some help with the boardwalk. We love the fact that people are coming to walk up here during the lockdowns, but it's in a terrible state and we really need to ask for some help. So because i was bored like everyone else and i needed something to get me out of the house and i thought it should be something to do to help people. How are you nails in fix a few broken boards on the boardwalk nice and i've been doing it for four years now. And we formed a really brilliant group. It's a lovely place. The nature trail itself is a path that follows up a beautiful valley with a chalk stream in it. And we've been working to rebuild the boardwalk there so that people can continue to enjoy it ever since. And we've got into conservation. We're learning about freshwater habitats from working with the Freshwater Habitats Trust. We're learning about ash dieback disease. We're learning about ecology. We've learned so much. And that's been a wonderful thing and the real the two real big things out of it for me have been being involved with my community and making a lot of really really good friends but also it's inspired my art. I never thought that might happen so i've been making artwork inspired by the place and by the work that we do on at the place. for a good few years now. You make your art link up to other bits of your life. It becomes a Yeah. And being open to go and do things as well, to try things like going and fixing the boardwalk. As you say, you think that would have nothing to do with drawing, but it's knock-on effect of things that you do that is quite surprising. I certainly have that experience. myself. I was going to mention completely randomly, but I've noticed recently on a lot of menus in pubs, chalk stream trout is on the menu. I was like, what's a chalk stream? It's a trout that's lived in a chalk stream. I was like, is that a thing? And We don't have trout in the Hinkley Heights stream. but we do have lots of other interesting life. From being a guy who was just, you know, happy to hit things with a hammer, I'm now, you know, I'm learning about things like alkaline fens. There are only something like 20 hectares of alkaline fen in the whole of the UK, and a lot of it is in Oxfordshire, and it's really, a really rare and precious environment with its own plant life and insect life, and we've got a good few hectares of it up on the trail. So I'm learning about, you know, everything joins up with everything else on the trail, you know. If you dig a hole somewhere, you might drain the fen up the other end, you know, that kind of thing. It's been another incredible bonus in my life. The team from the Freshwater Habitats Trust who work there alongside us, who are the guys that really know about alkaline fens, recently found a plant growing there that hasn't been recorded anywhere else in Amazing. Isn't that great? That is. Brilliant. It's a matter of time before I'm sitting up there with a raccoon skin Maybe. Maybe it might yet come. It's just a lovely place to be. I wake up on a Thursday morning and I think, great, I'm going up to the trail today to see my mates and build some That is brilliant. How super for you. You've told me before about another aspect of using your art for yourself, for your emotional, mental health. Can you tell us Yeah, I mean, as I said a little while ago, you know, you learn something about yourself. You put your art alongside your life rather than it being a kind of separate sort of floaty thing out there that you do when you're not living life. Another example of that for me would be I lost my dad in January. And so because I've got this ability to express things through art, I've used that to help me come to terms with the grief. It doesn't take the grief away by any means, I can tell you that. But it's sort of helped me put a shape to it. And that's been really helpful for me. And I don't think I'm quite finished working through all that yet. So there may be some more artwork to come. It's not the sort of artwork that I would sell. It couldn't possibly mean anything to anybody in the same way that it means to me. Well, I really value that I've been able to use my art in that way. And I'm really, really proud of the work that I've done on this theme. It's not something somebody would sell, but it's a way of putting your art right alongside your life, rather than it being a sort of thing that you lock yourself away in a nice, cosy studio and produce stuff. And I think almost every artist will say to you that there is something of themselves in their art. Art is invaluable to Yeah, this is what we really love to hear because there are so many benefits surrounding whatever creative outlet people find for themselves and why they find it and how they find it. and how it helps. So that's really It also comes back to the MFA in a funny sort of way because when you're doing the MFA, they don't teach you to do art. They don't say this is how you do it. They don't even ask you about what you're doing. A lot of it is you thinking about why you're doing it. Why are you doing this? Why are you doing that this way? And that can be a really difficult question to answer because sometimes you think, well, I just feel like drawing a picture of a tree. But actually, if you can get to a why, if there is a why that you can find and you can start to focus on it and express it, it makes your art so much deeper. And once you start down that road, I think it's quite hard not to. I did wonder when I first started out my art journey whether I might be an illustrator. And I used to draw rude pictures of Donald Trump and things that made my kids laugh and stuff like that. I still do occasionally. But eventually, I felt like I wanted to go deeper. So when something like losing my dad comes along, actually I feel like I can use my art in that way. If that Yeah, I completely see that. Moving on, what about the future? Do you have plans, As an artist, I want to get better. I want to feel like I'm really fulfilling my potential. That's my main thing. I don't have any really sort of specific objectives. I'd like to exhibit more. I'd like to sell a little bit more than I do. As I get ever closer to retirement age, I may have some time opening up for me to do things like that. I like to be involved with things as an artist, you know, like the portable group or the wonderful artists that I've got to know in Bonn in Germany. those are things i could do more of but i'm what i'm most excited about is the art i'm going to do and for me everything else follows from that so it's a pretty vague plan but i'm content with Fabulous. Thank you so much, Mark. How can people connect with you and see the work you're creating? Thank Well, you can see me on my website, which is www.markrclay.co.uk. I'm a terrible one for the Instagram. I'm completely addicted to it. So you can find me on there as mrclayox. You can also find me as part of Portable Collective Ox on Instagram. And you can also see the work that we're doing at Hinksey Heights Nature Trail on Instagram. I'm also on Facebook as MRC Studio. Lovely. Thank you. That's been an absolutely fabulous Thanks so much for listening to Creativity Found. I hope you enjoyed this episode and gained some value from it. 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