Gordon Glyn-Jones

My name is Gordon Glyn-Jones. I live in Putney in London. I do two jobs. I'm a commercial editor and media salesperson, and I am a fine artist.

So an artist is divided into two very distinct areas. I spend much of my time in solitary creating the art. So I have two studios. I'm very, very strong on drawing. And essentially, I'm a painter, I studied art.

So my day will look like, I'll sit at my desk from eight until three doing my sales and then I move on to my studio. I can work for about four hours intensively on painting.

And then the second part of being an artist is marketing yourself, which means social media, means putting shows together, means making connections with curators, buyers and collaborators, other artists.

The best thing about the combination between the two, I would say, is that I live in the commercial world and have meetings with high-power people and really feel like I function as a part of a commercial society.

But then I also can balance that with a very individual, expressive, creative side to me, which means that I can balance both parts of my brain and fulfill myself in a very much more powerful way than perhaps people who only have one strand to their life might do.

So if I have a week or two without art, I feel I start to get depressed. It's literally part of who I am, I need it and I thrive on it.

So the art is by far the most powerful force in terms of my own happiness and using my own brain, but I also love the balance between the two because art can be slightly isolating sometimes.

Ironically, the hardest part of my job is one of the things that's most enjoyable about it.

Balancing two jobs means that I have to dedicate 14 hours a day to work. And what that means is it impacts the other choices that I have with my life, whether it's relationships, social. So I work a large proportion of my life.

I think also the second part would be artist creation and turning art into commerce is sometimes tricky, which is why having the balance is good.

But sometimes maintaining the balance is very difficult because you have to be dedicated in two entirely different ways every single day of your life.

Well, I studied art at university, so it was a passion of mine right from the word go.

But when I left art school, I found that I'd been in a studio by myself for five years. I was 24 years old and I hadn't, I didn't know how to to open a bank account. I didn't know, I hadn't worked in an office, I hadn't done any work at all and was pretty naive and ignorant.

So I got involved with a friend of mine who had some capital but wanted to start a magazine. It was a very exciting time in South African history. Mandela had just been released. There was total freedom of the press.

So we started a magazine very similar to Time Out, which at the time was an entertainment information magazine. My first job was as editor in the magazine that I created.

We grew the title in a pretty impressive way. We were selling 25,000 copies a month in Cape Town, which is where I lived at the time.

The internet was starting to get big so that impacted our journey, but essentially I was through that magazine was able to travel to 50 different countries because I was doing travel journalism.

I moved to the UK, got a job at a similar publication. I've freelanced for over 15 different respectable publications, things like Cosmo, BBC Focus on Africa and so on.

15 years of my career was as a journalist, as an entertainment and culture journalist, which meant going to lots of gigs, interviewing very interesting

But then at some point as I went up the ladder, my art started to knock on my door again and I needed to do it.

So I'd worked as a publisher, which meant that I ran the sales team in a magazine and the editorial team. So I switched off the editorial side, turned on the art and kept the commercial side going.

I was always very passionate about English. I grew up in a house covered in books. Every single wall was a bookshelf. And I think that was the beginning of my education. I loved reading.

And I also had very creative parents who were, as well as being musical, created art. My mom is a silver jeweler. My dad can paint and play the cello and so on.

So I'd say my education started very young at home. I was lucky enough to have parents who were supportive of anything that I wanted to do.

Art school is, it's a rarity in terms of being given four years just to explore a range of mediums. So we did painting, we did photography, we did drawing. And it also gives you an opportunity to start to learn how to narrow down what it is you want to do.

I've always been passionate about all sorts of things like music and writing and art. So I would say for anybody who feels that way, just firstly, it's very normal and it's just the sign of an active, curious brain.

If you want to be very, very good at something, you do need to dedicate lots of time and practice to it.

But as far as education goes, the best part of education is teaching yourself to learn.

I would say that's the most powerful thing you can get from any educational institution.

Keep learning and keep teaching yourself throughout your whole life.

I'd like to answer that in a kind of a strange way.

I'm just very, very grateful that I didn't go into a job where I was doing the job simply to earn money.

So I would say that moment where I was brave enough to do the transition away because I was being offered to be CEO of our publishing company that I still work for, but I was being given the reins of the whole thing.

And I think it's a significant, takes a significant bravery to say no to that because there was a financial reward and there was a lot of status that went with that.

But I had this passion I wanted to express myself and I think that that sometimes has become a little bit of a weak term, express yourself as if it's some sort of frippery. But it's more than that.

So I'd say that's a very significant moment. I have had a more challenging life because of that and still do, but I think by the end of my life I'll appreciate that choice because it's just brought me so much internal joy and self-belief and empowerment as a human being and self-respect.

So yeah, guess that's probably the biggest moment is when I had the guts to do that.

Start saving money a little bit each month because you don't know what your choices are in the future.

That's not a very romantic answer, but I think it's... I just assumed when I was young that everything was going to come right, which has been fine, but I think that just having a financial buffer and that sort of backing would have made some of the choices that I made along the way smoother and easier and slightly less stressful and just made the path a little bit smoother, that's all.

So that's nothing to do with my career, but I genuinely believe that, I mean, I was given that advice. So that's the hard part is listening to advice rather than getting it.

Just a little bit each month. It may not be significant when you're young but it really, really helps.