Don’t Forget to Breathe
How I unlearned everything I thought I knew about being an artist and began again in my sixties
The act of creating art is always, in some way, an act of revealing, and of showing something deeply personal.
This essay began as a talk I gave recently here in my home town of Lewes titled Creativity, Community & Me. It was the first time I’d spoken publicly about my own creative journey - one that has taken me from self-doubt and detours to the relief of finally accepting something I wish I’d known, or had the wisdom to believe, at the age of seven:
That I am an artist.
I’ve always been a creative soul. And I’ve always been an artist. It’s just that it took me four decades, quite a few wrong turns, and a lot of unlearning to believe it.
The philosopher Alan Watts once said that “the biggest ego trip of all is trying to get rid of your ego.” I’ve found that’s true in art as well as life. The harder one tries to be a proper artist - to follow the rules, to tidy oneself into acceptability - the further you drift from the work your heart wants to make.
I’m sixty-four now and can honestly say I feel as though I’m at the beginning of the best years of my artistic life.
The journey I’m sharing is the one where I stopped allowing the external and internal babble of ridiculous false beliefs from tripping me up and started listening to what my heart already knew.
What follows is that story - the long road to self-recognition, the role of community in sustaining it, and what it means to create from the place you actually live.
Beginnings: The Tyranny of “Good”
As a child I loved to draw and to disappear into that wordless, suspended space where time drops away.
Then, when I was seven, someone glanced at one of my drawings and said, “That’s not much good.”
It landed like a hammer blow.
In that instant the world rearranged itself. Suddenly there was a right way and a wrong way to make art; it seemed there were mistakes you could make, and I was making them.
That single careless comment became a lifelong script. From that day, the tyranny of good and bad took over. My instincts were put on trial, and the verdicts were mostly guilty.
Like many sensitive children, I learned to overthink. I became hyper-attuned to tone, mood, and noise. Everything felt too bright, too loud and the world was too much. I didn’t recognise my sensitivity as anything in particular, I just assumed everyone else knew the rules and I was struggling to learn them.
But the upside of my brain being wired in that way is that I have a relentless curiosity and a belief in the possible. I may have been tangled inside, but I never stopped asking questions. Curiosity stayed alive even when my confidence was missing.
What I see now is that hypersensitivity and curiosity often live side by side. Even when my confidence was missing, my curiosity never left me. It kept asking questions, and curiosity, I think, is the engine room of creativity.
Falling Through the Gaps
I stopped attending school after the age of 14 and left with no qualifications to speak of - not because I wasn’t bright, but because my brain simply doesn’t do curricula or exams. I didn’t even understand what a syllabus was and exams made no sense to me. I thought that was a personal failing.
My parents didn’t engage with my education and I kind of slipped through the gaps; something I think would be harder to happen today.
When I was fifteen, my Dad said, “You should get a trade, son.” I didn’t know what that meant, or why it mattered.
By then, that childhood belief - I can’t do art - had hardened into a truth and when I was told I wasn’t allowed to take art at school, the belief became hard-wired in my brain.
I carried that belief like a shadow for decades.
The Long Detour
At sixteen I officially left school on a Friday, and the following Monday was wedged into the 7.20 a.m. train from Haywards Heath to London for a job I didn’t want. The noise, the crowd and the sheer wrongness of it all pressed in on me. I had an artistic energy with nowhere to go, and it was unbearable.
My twenties became a restless pursuit of something I couldn’t name. I worked as a freelance costumier on films, following in my father’s trade, which gave me enough money to travel widely, but even that didn’t give me the confidence to call myself an artist.
Looking back, I was deeply lost but still driven by curiosity. I now know there’s a name for that kind of self-teaching: autodidact.
I can’t follow a recipe, but I can cook delicious food. I can’t sit an exam, but I can invent and start a successful company from nothing.
What I know now is that the only way I can learn anything is by doing - and the way I learn is by imagining and then making. I have taught myself what I need to know, it’s the only way my brain can handle it: through play and persistence, and not through instructions, manuals or tests.
I’ve never really taken any sort of course or passed any exam that required any study - I do have O level English grade B but only because I’m instinctively good at spelling and grammar.
Despite this I somehow ended up with a degree.
Finding a Way In
When I stopped trying so hard, things began to happen.
In my twenties I sometimes liked to wander around London taking photographs, fascinated by the ordinary. One day I met a photographer off Ladbroke Grove who taught me darkroom skills, and soon after I applied for a photography degree.
Art college wasn’t easy. In fact it was tortuous because I still believed that mistakes were possible, and in the tyranny of good and bad. But it gave me a language, a framework, and a glimpse of possibility. Martin Parr, who these days is one of the most famous photographers in the world, was one of my lecturers. I was too embarrassed to show him my work.
At the fall of communism, as the wall came down, I spent a lot of time in Poland and it’s only recently I’ve realised there was merit in the work I made back then. I haven’t shown it publicly yet. I may do soon.
Then, in my final year in 1991, I encountered an Apple Macintosh for the first time. I created an interactive project about Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, inspired by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing and Peter Gabriel’s experiments in multimedia.
Suddenly I could see and feel that the future was going to be in this new dynamic medium. Within a few years, I was married with children, and my wife and I had started one of the first digital media companies in the country right here in Lewes before moving it to Brighton.
Because it was all so new - there was no rulebook, no ceiling and the potential felt infinite. It was exciting. We built a team. We won prestigious awards, and my name became well known in the fast-evolving world of the new media.
And then, after a few years, I started to suffocate.
Success and the Starvation of Creativity
The educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson once said that “we educate creativity out of children.”
I discovered that we do much the same in business. You can’t pay a team with failed experiments. You can’t meet the payroll for dozens of people with “we’ll see what happens.”
Business rewards predictability, creativity thrives on risk.
The more successful my company became, the more I felt torn between responsibility and the way my brain actually works. Responsibility required control; creativity demanded freedom. The two collided until the joy drained away.
I didn’t yet have the words for what was happening, but I do now: I was trying to perform to an external script, starving the part of myself that lives through exploration.
The Return to Art
Eventually I started painting.
In 2015, I was in my fifties, newly separated, living alone on the High Street. My daughters were nearly grown, and I’d left the business I couldn’t sustain behind me.
I bought a big board and some paint. I had no plan and no audience, just an empty space and a desperate need to feel something.
I spread paint with whatever was to hand - fingers, rulers, a knife. It seemed casual and out of control, but it wasn’t. It was the first time in years I gave myself permission to be messy and to make without consequence.
The relief was both physical and visceral. I had no curriculum; there was no script, no exam and no judge. Just sensation.
It was the feeling of freedom which comes with not caring what other people think. The heaviness I’d carried since I was seven began to lift. Painting with the abandon of a child felt like coming home.
And then something remarkable happened.
Within a few weeks a visitor saw my first painting, called Don’t Forget to Breathe (after the wonderful Alexi Murdoch song Breathe) and said, “Can I buy that?” So, remarkably, I sold it for a four figure sum. I hadn’t made it for anyone. I hadn’t tried to please or perform. And yet, that’s when my real artistic life began.
Don’t Forget to Breathe, the first abstract painting by John Worth (2015)
There’s a great clip in YouTube with a now famous David Bowie quote about being an artist which rings true for me. He said:
That, I realised, was what painting had given me again: the courage to go out of my depth.
Discovering the Language of Art
After that first sale, I began studying artists who seemed to give permission by their very existence: Antoni Tàpies for his spiritual connection to materials and texture; Tracey Emin for her raw honesty; Bowie for his constant reinvention.
And then, in Waterstones one afternoon, I stumbled across a book on Cy Twombly. His work hit me like a revelation. At first it seemed childlike, even chaotic, but the emotional power in those marks was undeniable. Twombly painted in a language beyond words. It was ancient, intimate, courageous and extremely seductive.
He showed me that the deepest work often looks the simplest, and that authenticity has its own aesthetic logic.
The Realisation
In early 2024 I sat down to write a piece for my website titled My Artistic Journey.
I thought I was writing a conventional About page. What I didn’t realise at the time was that I was lighting a fuse.
When I wrote the words “I am incapable of sitting an exam” it was a revelation and then with a bang my personal history reframed itself.
The significance of those few words revealed something seismic. For the first time, I understood that I’d spent my life trying to conform to systems I wasn’t built for.
That’s when I recognised, without needing a diagnosis that I am likely to be quite significantly neurodivergent. I’m not medically labelled ADHD or autistic, but enough of the traits fit: my hypersensitivity; the overwhelm I feel; the internalised confusion and the need to work in my own rhythms.
Naming it didn’t make me an artist, but it has helped me understand how and why I make art and has given me compassion for myself and the way I’m wired.
The realisation was both devastating and freeing. It helped me stop asking, What’s wrong with me? and start asking, What does my brain actually need?
I’ve no desire for a formal diagnosis. Labels can be cages, but insight can be a key.
Building a Practice That Fits
Now I work according to my own rhythms: short, intense bursts of concentration punctuated by movement.
Movement is essential to my work. Walking in a chosen landscape is an important part of my process, as is pacing around a painting. Creating a piece feels like a dance, and the joy of any dance lies in being inside it, not standing apart as an observer.
I’ve stopped pretending I’ll ever learn from manuals or courses. I create first and edit later - allowing my instincts to lead, then inviting judgement to tidy up afterwards without strangling the life out of the work.
And I’ve learned something else. What it means to be a part of a supportive community.
Because of the way I’m wired, I can’t thrive within structures that dictate how I should work, and I’ve never felt comfortable with the idea of the traditional gallery system. Here in Lewes, I feel I’m part of a community that has opened doors to me and I’ve been very fortunate in the past few years to have shown my work in some extraordinary places. My exhibitions have taken place in intimate, self-made spaces where people come to talk, ask questions, and share stories.
The conversations that have happened during my exhibitions have become part of my process. We think of artists as solitary, but in truth, creativity is a relay. Someone passes you a torch, and one day you’ll pass it on.
For me, one of those early torches came from local artist Rachel Plummer. Seeing her work ten years ago made me believe I could start. That single spark was enough.
Creativity, Community, Me
If there’s a thread running through my story, it’s this: I spent years trying to pass exams that didn’t exist - invisible exams of worthiness and belonging that were mostly in my head.
When I stopped performing for those imaginary invigilators, my work matured, and I began feeling the visceral pleasure of being an artist.
The systems we grow up in - education, business, society - are built on a fear of mistakes. But in the studio, mistakes aren’t evidence against you, they are evidence that you’re alive. That’s where the new thing lives.
Thinking about the Alan Watts’s paradox - the ego trying to get rid of the ego - became, for me, the artist trying to become a “Proper” Artist. When I stop tidying myself into acceptability, my ego quietens, and the work becomes more authentic. I’m certain people can sense that.
At exhibitions visitors often say, “I’d love to paint, but it’s too late.” I used to believe that too. Now I know there is no “too late.” There’s only honest, authentic, and ready.
The life we’re sold at school peaks early and then declines. I’m happy to report that mine keeps beginning again.
Where I Am Now
In 2019, I decided to become a full-time artist. My practice now spans painting, photography, and writing.
This year I completed a novel I started twenty years ago - The Many Truths of Josef Batten. It’s about memory, connection, and community - the same themes that run through my art. I only found the courage to finish it when I stopped believing there was a right and wrong way to write a book.
My next project is to build an online home for my work - Fragments of Place: Felt, Remembered, and Kept.
For over five years I walked the same path up Mount Caburn on the South Downs near Lewes, and much of my work has grown out of that rhythm - walking, listening to music and remembering. Place, for me, is memory in motion.
Three Little Truths
If I could compress forty years of unlearning into three small truths, they would be these:
1. Creativity: Your instincts aren’t wrong, they’re just quieter than your inner critic. Turn the judgement down. Make the mark first. Decide what it means later.
2. Community: We don’t do this alone. A kind word, an open door, a shared conversation - these are the moments that change lives. Be that person for someone else and allow others to be that person for you.
3. Me: Accept how you’re wired. It doesn’t make you less of an artist; it explains why and how you create. When you work from the heart, the work gets truer, and life gets easier.
Just Getting Started: At sixty-four, I feel like I’m only beginning. If anything in this story rings true, I hope it gives you permission to start, or to start again.
Follow your raw curiosity, not your critic.
Thank you for being part of the community that keeps artists going.
Author’s note:
This essay first appeared as a talk I gave in Lewes on 18 October 2025. It forms part of my ongoing series on creativity, art, and belonging. You can find more of my work at johnworthartist.co.uk.