Art for Energy

Working in investments involves periods of existential crises. Trying to explain underperformance can be really testing even if you are a hardcore believer. Beyond accepting that there are periods of stress and risk, actually going through persistent underperformance is emotionally draining. Which is why people don’t tend to invest in a contrarian way. 

It ends up being semi-religious. In the same way as I had to grapple with whether Yoga was religion, many investment companies feel very much like Churches with High Priests. Some people think of yogis as cults and some people think of investment schools of thought as cults. The type of language that gets used can seem culty, evangelical, or defensive. Maintaining some healthy space between “work as an evaluation of self” and things I was doing to rebuild my energy became very important to me. 

I started spending my weekends at the Wimbledon Art Studio doing expressionist painting that was non-intellectual and more of an embodied physical art. I was painting, but in a responsive way that focused on texture, colour, and layering. I can thank my school art teacher, Mr Lichkus, for pushing (and pushing and pushing) me to my limits in this space. In one class review, he stood there saying “no one bump me, no one bump me”... then a classmate tapped him on the shoulder and he went “OOOPS!!!” and put shoe polish across my painting... so that it “broke it” and stopped me being so precious. 

I managed to loosen up my very earnest, tight, approach... and I used my weekends to reconnect to releasing some of that wilder energy onto the canvas. Between art and yoga, I was trying to reconnect with who or what I was. That was not defined by under- or outperforming anybody's benchmarks or expectations.