Welcome Rod Kitson to The ArtStepper, and thank you for joining me. I first came across you on TikTok, where you were painting your flat and you'd better explain what that means. 

I'm making this sort of life-sized jigsaw where I'm recreating my living space as a series of square paintings. I paint one a day and it all joins together to make this larger work. So it's one piece, but each square is a painting in its own right.

Approaching it each day means it goes with my moods, my emotions and my feelings and represents my journey. It's not meant to be perfect, it's meant to be warts and all. It shows an artist growing.

So behind you over your right shoulder, you've got some pictures of shoes so .. those are the squares. So you move a frame around your flat and paint what you see inside the frame. Is that right? 

The thing about doing it in a daily presentation on TikTok is that I'm aware I can get into patterns of speech about it. And I'm aware that I can lose the meaning of it if I repeat it too many times. I suppose that’s a microcosm of the project itself, where you're repeating something to the point of becoming so comfortable with it, it becomes like breathing.

That is my goal with my art, to make it so it's intuitive. I have the language by getting better at it, getting to a point where I can express myself with the ease with which I walk or talk or breathe. That for me, is the true expressive art. 

Another thing I've been reflecting on is my obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). My need to do it every day is very strong, it's almost harder for me to not do it.

This is the second time I've done this. I started it back in 2018 when I did 190 straight days. And I painted my rug, I painted my sofa, I painted my bookcase. I painted the velux window, painted the skylight, and I did that in 190 consecutive days. It was about me getting better at painting because I was very new to it back then. There was no real playfulness it was strictly about this daily practice, whereas this time around it's different.

I don't wanna put that sort of pressure on myself. I'm not in the army. There's no reason why I have to do it every day. As soon as I start to think of it as “I need to give my people their daily ‘episode’” then I know that I need to step away and reevaluate who I'm doing it for.

I don't want it to seem like it's gimmicky. Art should never be about numbers or about goals. It's about progression. And I think I'm much more reflective this time around, being a much more mature man and somebody who's got seven more years experience of doing the process and the art.

I'm much more confident in myself as an artist now to be able to do those things, with a bit of playfulness, and give myself a break. I'm probably a bit kinder to myself these days. 

You said to me that whereas you were literally selling the squares individually, now you're thinking of it as an art installation. So your development is huge actually. 

Exactly. That's about self-esteem as well, valuing my work a lot more. 

Selling each piece by the square foot worked for me back then. The idea of machines for living, le Corbusier, building utilitarian living spaces. That's exactly how I felt. It was like I was this builder just making stuff and I was labeling myself as more as a craft person or as a builder than an artist.

I was trying to debunk the myth of art because I didn't believe in myself as an artist. Whereas now I take myself more seriously. I can see this piece in the Turner Prize.

You were talking about OCD and you've turned it into a strength. I really love that. I think psychologist Carl Rogers pioneered that way of thinking.

continues ..

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Rod Kitson interview continues:

What do they say? Make your neurodivergence into a superpower. 

So that's how I came to you. That is a project that's reaching out to new people but then I found you run this gallery. You've done 500 portraits of local people. The last open call you did at the gallery you had 150 artists come along. And you’ve got life drawing classes.

Then we had this brief conversation and you said, “well, I don't really do any marketing”. And I'm thinking, well, no, you do. All that doesn't just happen.

Just to underline that, you’ve 21k followers on TikTok. 2.5k followers for the Art of Isolation gallery, and 25k followers on Instagram. I think it's to do with connection. It might be to do with where you live and population density, how long you've lived in a place, maybe you find it easy to talk to people. What do you think is going on, because this feels like word of mouth to me?

Yeah, I think so. I think that's fair. I think it's one of those things where I've been working pretty hard for a number of years and it's about reputation, doing what I say I'm gonna do. That's the community stuff, being reliable. Stuff that isn't particularly sexy, like turning up, turning up on time, being available and being reliable.

I believe in synchronicity. I believe that I was in a place where I was meant to be, to have that opportunity to approach the shopping center where I have my studio. It's a repurposed shop. It was empty, I spotted it, thought I could turn into a gallery and that’s where I showed the first incarnation of this squares project back in 2019.

That was just a popup but COVID happened, I noticed people were taking up a lot of creative pursuits over lockdown, and I thought it would be really great to bring all of those energies together into one show. 

The Art of Isolation brought together around 200 pieces of work that people had made globally during lockdown and it was the first show to open anywhere in, maybe in Britain, certainly in London that was about work made in isolation. Before Grayson Perry, before Jeremy Deller and it was where the community aspect started big time.

I'd never done anything like that before. To organise, juggling 200 artists or whatever is a big undertaking. Then we did another show called The End, The Class of 2020. I did two group shows in a year and both of them were wicked successes.

Ultimately my landlords said “we love what you're doing there, the energy you're bringing to the place so carry on”. It's about relationships and it’s not luck, I’m fortunate, but I've made it work, you know? 

That isn't something you can do overnight. I came into the community maybe eight, nine years ago. It takes time to establish yourself. Now I'm like the go-to guy around here and I'm making art accessible where there wasn't anything like that before.

I've got a big chip on my shoulder about elitism in the art world. It's about recognising that in me and projecting that out to people who might feel the same. I've always tried to make my offering accessible to people, and that's what I do with a life drawing as well. You know, it's the cheapest in London. And people come every weekend and we turn my studio into a life drawing studio.

Tell me about the community that you live in. 

Surrey Quays, South East London, Zone Two. It's a good little spot, you know. It's fairly blue collar. I think for the first time in my life I feel like I'm really part of a community, I know lots of people, I'm fairly established and it's a friendly place and a good place to live. You've got a lot of good environments, loads of the old docks and the woodland area, a nature reserve. 

The population density is part of it, isn't it? There's a lot of people around to make all this happen. If you tried to do this in a small village, that's different isn't it?

Yes and no. There's a lot of competition in London for life drawing classes, probably 50 or 60 across London on a weekly basis. So you've gotta make your offering a bit different. You can't be complacent about it. So I do things like doing a demo. You know, I sit down in the front of the class and I show how to draw.

My friend opened one in Tunbridge Wells and he said it's really busy. He said, if you ever need a good income, move just out of London and set up a life drawing class, somewhere where there isn't one.

One of the things I was curious about was, when you saw that shop and decided to do a popup show in there. What situation were you in at that point? Because not everyone would walk past an empty shop and go, ‘I'm gonna do something with that’.

We know there's loads of vacant shops everywhere, but it's whether the developers are open to trusting someone, that's a two-way thing. I've done my bit, you know. Whether other artists would be doing it to that extent is up to them. But it's also up to the developers to be open enough to see there's an opportunity to use those spaces as real cultural hubs for creativity.

That could absolutely translate to smaller towns because every town's got empty shops. In my case, I had 190 square foot of work so I knew that I needed a certain size space, the local galleries were too small or expensive.

That made using an empty shop perfect. It worked and it fitted in with the aesthetic of the work as well.

So you've talked about trusting the process when we were preparing for this interview, I'm kind of curious about that. 

Trusting the universe is a lot easier to do once you've put in a lot of groundwork beforehand. I'm happy that I was so obsessively driven in the past. I still am to a degree. I try to be less so.

I take a lot more thought over things, my artwork, my process than I did back then when it was more about driving myself to work all the time.

I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now, with the privilege of being able to be more considered, if I hadn't done all of that grunt work before. I can be a bit more holistic about it now.

If you talk about an inspiration for the squares project, it's Brian Eno. Trusting the process is about one thing leading to another.

The first thing I ever did in sections was a plant, which was on my window sill. I thought I could either paint this thing over five days as one piece, or I've got these little scraps of canvas and I could actually make, build the thing over five different sections.

In my head, that's a much more honest way of doing it because I'm not homogenising all of my emotions from the five different sittings into one thing. You got these little fly eye snapshots of the process. I did that and I thought, oh, this is way more interesting.

It speaks to me more about my experience than doing one thing and homogenising my anger one day and my frustration the other day then my joy the other day, and then all becoming like this soup, you know, in one picture, which would be what this would be if I painted my whole flat real size on a giant canvas over the same number of days.

It would be totally homogenised. It would just be bland and slightly blended. There'd be no message, no story. Doing it in pieces, you're getting these little snapshots of the day and what's going on. That’s a much more accurate and honest representation of life.

The process is: one thing leads to another. Accretion. I was doing the five pieces of the plant. Brian Eno was on the radio with Shean Keaveny on Six Music. This was 2018 or something. And he said, “Sean, what's better than having nothing?” “I dunno, Brian”, he goes “having something”.

When you've got something, you've got something to work off. You can look at that thing, reference it, judge it, move around, oh, how do I change that? And then you build this next thing. He said, that's accretion. That's building this matter, attracting one another until you get this giant whole which is made up of all these little parts.

And I thought, damn, that's exactly what I'm doing. Accretion. You know? Almost like forming its own gravity.

I love the honesty of the individual squares and the emotion that you had at the time that you did that, that's quite an inspiration. 

I've thought about the way that we perceive things. I think David Hockney did say this about the way that we see things. You know, do we see things in one piece? How are we seeing the world? Is it as one thing or is it in these little bits? I haven't really found an answer to that. 

I love as well, one of the things that you said: “I'm special, but no more special than anyone else”, that speaks to your equality and accessibility. 

I think everyone's got a story, haven't they? You know, everyone's got their own story. It's whether we apply ourselves, whether we feel the desire to get it out there.

You know, I do wonder what drives me to want to express myself, to push myself out there for other people to see. Is it a childhood thing of wanting to be heard and seen and to matter, to be important?

It's not for everyone. Not everybody has that desire to get themselves out there. I think some of the more mentally well people don't need to do that. It's interesting in our society how we are obsessed with fame. There's a bit of a paradox there because the people who wanna be famous and the people who get famous are, aren't necessarily the most mentally well people, because they're striving for outside validation.

The people we should be using as role models are the people who are at home, happy with their families, without the need to validate themselves from outside.

You are a beautiful man.

There was something else you said about TikTok allowing you to be authentic, where you moved away from Instagram a little bit. 

Yeah. I didn't know anyone there & that’s very freeing. 

A lot of the content creators are talking about “you've gotta go through the cringe” and I just don't feel there's that freedom, there wasn’t that freedom for me on Instagram. I was very, very resentful of that platform for quite a while, and I didn't understand why. I just had to step away from it.

I have one phone in the studio, which has Instagram on which I look at maybe twice, three times a week, and then I have my TikTok which is daily because I don't feel the same level of insecurity.

I think with Instagram, I feel there's a lot of posturing, a lot of kind of jostling for position, it's kind of a small little echo chamber really.

It's gotta be an instant thing. Things that take a bit more time to digest don't do well. What gets validated is fairly competent oil painting, not so much art with ambition. I don't see much desire to be conceptual and maybe that platform doesn't really support conceptual art.

We're given quite a lowbrow form of art because it suits the algorithm, it gives people an  instant hit. I had to step away from it.

Somebody like Rachel Whiteread, for example, or Anthony Gormley or Cornelia Parker, these people who make me think about my place, the space that I inhabit, about my consciousness, which a competent painting of a vase of flowers doesn't do.

One day I unfollowed everyone and that was a great feeling, and, weirdly enough, as soon as you unfollow everyone, you become more desirable.

On TikTok, I don't know anyone. That makes it much easier to be free and authentic and I'm building up from, from nothing. And I don't feel judged. I feel judged when I go on Instagram.

So finally, just an off the wall question. I feel like in my early days, there was a fork in the road where I could have gone this way, but I ended up as a marketer, what would you be if you weren't an artist? 

I'd love to have been a footballer. Or .. I was a journalist for like 10 years and I could have gone down that road further but I realised it's living vicariously, telling someone else's story.

When I kind of got out of that into doing art full time I realised, shit, this is me. I hadn't done it for 10 years. Journalism had kind of been a creative outlet, but it wasn't really fulfilling. So when I came back into art doing painting, I was like, wow, this is what it feels like to be authentic.

Life became a lot easier and a lot more enjoyable. 

But there's loads of stuff I like doing. I love doing practical tasks. I did my work experience at a small airport in Shoreham-by-Sea in Sussex. I still, to this day, love Second World War planes and all the pre jet kind of technology, all the slightly Heath Robinson ways they found to get through problems.

This has been fantastic. I've loved chatting with you and yeah, I hope you win the Turner Prize, and then I can say, well, I spoke to him back in 2025, I'm his mate on TikTok. I can say that when you win,

Let's start manifesting. 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Yeah, that's what I'm doing by saying it, man. Putting it out there. 

All right. So how do I manifest that for you? I'll just tell this tale of how I interviewed this artist and out of the blue he said, I wanna win the Turner Prize and I think I can do it.

There you go. Believe.