Advertising isn’t art, but there is an art to advertising.

Image Tim Haynes

‍ ‍“Don’t wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.” Henri Matisse.

If you’ve ever spent time listening to commercial artists describing their dreams and ambitions, you’ll know the stereotypes.

Every second copywriter has a screenplay in development and a novel in the bottom drawer.

Most art directors and designers would be fine artists if it paid enough to eat two minute noodles less regularly.

And those who direct commercials for a living fall asleep with visions of Coppola, Kubrick and Tarantino dancing in their heads.

At least, they do if they’re any good.

Because sometimes, stereotypes exist for the right reason.

Oddly, for people who spend their lives making something out of thin air, the best commercial artists have a pathological aversion to the spaces in between. 

Those times when the briefs and money aren’t flowing, but the ideas still are.

And just as nature forces whatever’s at hand into a vacuum, those ideas have to go somewhere.

Preferably somewhere beyond a notebook or sketch pad, because as the job description states, being a working creative is about making things. 

It’s not just the reason you get paid; it’s your reason for being.

Which incidentally is one of the reasons why being an agency CD, ECD or CCO pinballs between being the best and worst job in the world.

Ask anyone who’s run a creative department, and they’ll tell you that when the ideas are flowing freely and consistently sold into a full and productive pipeline, creatives are the easiest people in the world to manage.

In fact, it’s a sheer joy.

But if the ideas aren’t getting sold (or worse, repeatedly falling at the last hurdle) you suddenly find yourself in charge of a troupe of demented howler monkeys with all the emotional resilience of a pack of Italian greyhounds.

In retrospect, it’s probably one of the great attractions of freelancing and consultancy. 

After leaving uni into the aftermath of the ‘recession we had to have’, I spent a couple of years ruining my lower spine in a warehouse.

Along with teaching me the nuances of upright and standard forklifts, I quickly learned the value of those ‘spaces in between’ I mentioned earlier.

Or rather, the importance of filling them on your own terms.

This became abundantly clear one Friday afternoon when I’d picked, packed and dispatched all my orders, emptied the 44-gallon drums that doubled as bins, filled the bog roll holders in the toilets and checked if the Goods Inwards bloke needed a hand unloading anything.

With his “Yeah, nah, mate…all good” echoing in my ear and an empty in tray on my scrupulously tidy bench, I was engrossed in the lunchroom copy of Street Machine.

That’s when the Warehouse Manager, in the manner of a cat making a beeline for the only person in the room who hates cats, zeroed in on the only grubby, safety booted idiot not wandering around the racks with a clipboard, pretending to be busy.

Long and tedious story short, I spent the remainder of Friday afternoon on my hands and knees with a dustpan and brush, cleaning out the expansion joints in the concrete floor of a warehouse only slightly smaller than the one in the final scene of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. 

Lesson learned. 

When your hands are idle, it’s better they do the Devil’s work than something soul-crushingly pointless.

Which is why working for yourself really is the last refuge for commercial artists with fine art talents and ambitions.

From experience, ad agencies and design studios are a lot like the warehouses of my youth. When 7.5 hours must be accounted for every day, the spaces between briefs have to be filled with something, and chances are it’ll end up being the last thing you want to do.

But as a free agent, that space is yours.

Sure, there’s no guarantee what you fill it with will help pay the rent, but like a professional athlete, you get paid for your performance on game day, not the countless hours of training you do when nobody’s watching.

And that training analogy is the key to all of this.

Because making art that moves you in your spare time is as much about you training to be the sharpest art director, designer, copywriter or commercials director you can be, as it is chasing your artistic ambitions.

What’s more, clients who work with those sorts of creatives aren’t just getting a team that’s match fit; their briefs get the attention of people who think bigger, wider and deeper by nature.

Art influencing life, if you like.

It’s something we (being me, Tim Haynes and Ian Reiser) have done all our commercial creative lives and I think it goes a long way towards explaining our collective longevity and relative sanity.

The latest example?

This piece from Tim titled ‘The Ghost of Van Eileen’. 

If you grew up on the Indian Ocean any time between the late 1940s and the back end of the '90s, you’ll have fond (and, given its proximity to the OBH and Cottesloe Hotel, occasionally blurry) memories of Van Eileen as the source of Perth’s best beachside burgers and steak sandwiches.

For Cottesloe’s Sculpture By The Sea, Tim recreated the demolished icon, put it back on the sand where it belongs, and won the Capral Artist Prize for his efforts.  

But as I said, it’s only the most recent output from the habits of a lifetime.

After noodling around with short films since I was a junior copywriter, I finally adapted a novel into a feature screenplay that’s swirling its way through the funding funnel.

Between art direction gigs and large scale sculptural installations, Tim keeps busy in his studio making extraordinary art from ordinary bits and pieces.

And when Ian’s not making ads and the like for agencies and studios, he’s directed a couple of shows for the ABC and Netflix and pesters me to flesh out his brilliantly twisted idea for the next great Australian horror film.

The point is, paid or not, we’re never not working on turning ideas into reality.

Which we reckon is the most reliable standard to use if you’re thinking of working with anyone who has the word ‘creative’ anywhere on their CV.

Speaking of which, have a look at what we’ve been up to at guthriehaynes.com and if you feel inspired, get in touch.

We’re going to keep making interesting things either way, so it might as well be for you.