The Art of PR exhibition is back this week to celebrate the creative talents flourishing within the UK’s public relations industry. Hosted at London’s Coningsby Gallery from the 8th to the 13th of September, this event spotlights 19 artists who bridge the worlds of PR and professional artistry. For those unable to attend in person, Occhi Contemporary Art’s virtual gallery will extend the experience online from September 15th to October 15th.
Among the standout returning artists is Joe Thomas—an award-winning creative and communications leader whose impressive career spans notable brands such as Virgin Media, Google, itsu, and Aldi. Now advising a diverse range of organisations and agencies, Joe presents his latest studio works, inspired by a passion for cartography and the exploration of psychological and geographic spaces. He’ll also be hosting a series of live portraiture sessions throughout the week. We caught up with Joe to dive into his creative process and discover what fuels his artistic vision.
Joe, thanks for agreeing to speak with us. Your career in PR and comms spans both agency and in-house roles for major brands. What’s been the most challenging lesson you’ve learned about creativity in corporate environments, and how has it shaped your approach to art?
One trait that a lot of creative, generative people have is the ability to see and imagine lots of different possibilities and ideas. As someone who has always been able to quickly generate and imagine a high volume of ideas, and do that with energy and excitement.
The challenge in the corporate world is in editing and refining down big, infinite thoughts and possibilities into specific ideas and proposals that can be communicated with brevity, clarity and ease. That in itself can be a beautiful thing.
So, when I’m working on a creative campaign brief for a client, there is a constant temptation to add and add and add layers and options and ‘what ifs’ when really, what you need is clarity.
This search for clarity, brevity, and simplicity is part of how I make art. My work doesn’t need to say lots of things, or show off that I know how to use lots of media and materials, and become confusing; it just needs to say enough. And that’s enough.
The search for that brevity and clarity has taken several years and required exploring many avenues and possibilities – but that’s just the same as kicking the tyres on a brief, looking at different routes and having the skill to whittle the thousands of possibilities into a small number of specific options.
Transitioning from a high-profile comms career to becoming a practicing artist is a bold move. What were the biggest internal and external obstacles you faced in making that leap, and how did you overcome them?
So the transition, fundamentally, came from the need to give voice to my own thoughts and feelings, a need to honour and respect talents and interests, but also from a drive to set an example to my kids that if you want to do something in life, then you’ve got to give it a go.
But like a frustratingly bad comms brief, I had no useful detail or strategy. I knew the outcome was to honour my artistic drive, curiosity and abilities, and the only way to find out what that would look like, or how it would manifest, was simply to start, keep going, and see what happens.
I knew I was okay at drawing and painting, but wanted to develop some technical abilities, so did some classes and lots of practice, and in 2022, I set the ambition of putting some of my work into the public, so I signed up to be part of the Artists Open House exhibition in Dulwich as a means to focus my mind and energies.
But in reality, I didn’t have much work of true merit besides lots of life drawing work to hang on the walls, so I thought a good way of attracting attention and creating a buzz was to do super-fast, figurative portraits of anyone who visited the space I was sharing with some other lovely artists.
In two weekends, I’d sketched over a hundred people and pets, had drawn some decent crowds, and had lots of fun. This in turn led to people booking me to sketch guests at houseparties, events, outside galleries, and in markets, and the pressure/excitement of only having four or five minutes to capture the essence of a sitter with a few coloured pastels on black paper was great practice and made a lot of people happy.
As fun as doing these sittings are, I was primarily doing it because it was a thing I could do and could trade on, and as tempting and seductive as portraiture is, it was a creative process rather than an expressive one.
Cartography is a unique artistic focus. How do you see the relationship between psychological and geographic places manifesting in your work?
I love maps because they help us when we’re lost.
There was a point, in the winter of 2024, when, on a number of life’s fronts, I felt genuinely lost.
I’d developed a lovely habit of drawing warm, tonal vignettes of whatever I’d been up to that day.
But one day after I’d been out in the rain-sodden hills of mid-Wales with my partner and one of my oldest friends, I started to sketch out some photos of the day, but rather than going for tone, I draw out the contours and interconnected curves of fields, mountainsides, treelines and clouds in one near-continuous line with the pencil barely leaving the page.
It turns out I’d just drawn the map I needed to work out my way through being lost.
This single image, ‘Not Yet Lost’, is one of the most satisfying things I’ve drawn, and it opened the door for me to develop my own process and technique where I’ll take a landscape scene and iteratively draw that scene using purely lines.
I’ll start with a source image, like a photograph or a sketch, and then copy and reduce, or conflate those lines into the next study. I do this so that (within reason) I disconnect with what the original object or line was. For example, I’ll not be consciously thinking ‘that’s a tree line’ or ‘that’s a line which denotes a barrier between dark cloud and blue sky’.
The result is often that the viewer knows and feels safe that the image centres them confidently in a landscape or place, but without dictating the route they need to take, or what information they should take as literal to understand that landscape.
Your art explores perceptions of place—both mental and physical. Can you share a personal experience where these two concepts collided for you, and how that influenced your creative direction?
I’m one of the millions of people who need to be in and venture through nature to clear my head, work through problems, and reflect. This is a universal behaviour.
What I’m interested in is exploring the two journeys we take at once – the physical journey that we can plot on a map, can measure on Strava, or can experience by seeing how muddy our shoes get, and the psychological experience of that journey, or being in that place. This second side is about the thoughts, ideas, and conversations we mentally work through on those journeys and how humans are programmed to need to go to different places to work through whatever else is happening in life.
Having worked with brands like Virgin Media, Google, itsu, and Aldi, how do you reconcile the commercial objectives of PR with the often introspective and personal motivations of art-making?
For me, this is quite straightforward. At work, creativity is a tool for problem-solving for clients – be that a brand with a challenge or an agency that wants ideas they can sell. Whereas creating art is about self-expression. And as a single parent of two teenagers, I have minimal qualms about work, which helps me put food on the table.
This said, so much of the core processes are the same, and both boil down to the ability to communicate, create connection between things, and having the skill to use the tools at hand – whether that’s knowing how to manipulate oil paints, or craft a story that will get picked up in the news.
What role do mentorship and creative collaboration play in your process? In your opinion, what’s the most misunderstood aspect of the PR industry, and how do you address or challenge those misconceptions through your art?
I think it proves that PR is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to originality, authenticity, and creating fundamental emotional impact. PR is also an industry that helps clients do real things and act in real ways – not just make claims.
For example, take stunts – these are real things, real experiences, or, in artistic terms, ‘interventions’ – things which, to be effective PR, need to matter enough for people to want to talk and write about them.
For my art and my work as a PR creative director, I get a kick from showing how PRs can be the ones that bring a touch of magic, wonderment, bravery, originality, or truth to solving a problem.
I also think that PR is too often seen as a non-visual discipline, as it is too dominated by the written word and the press release, or by the network value of a comms person and who they know. The Art of PR, I hope, proves this wrong.
Your upcoming exhibition features live portraiture sittings. What draws you to this interactive format, and how do you prepare yourself—mentally and creatively—for such public, unscripted moments?
I started doing the live sittings as a way to create spectacle and entertainment and make the creative process interactive and accessible. For most sessions, I’ll need a few runs to get the pastels and my eyes warmed up. But fundamentally, I like the risk, uncertainty, the burst of adrenaline, and the creative boundaries of a time.
Anyone who’s been to life drawing classes will be familiar with short-pose warm-up exercises, where you capture a figure in 5,10, or 15 seconds. I love these exercises, it’s like having to edit a headline down to seven words, or summarising a paragraph in a single sentence – it’s about concision, focus, and swift judgement. The results are fast, figurative, colourful, and lots of fun.
Here are some examples of these in action – Instagram featured image
You advise brands and agencies alongside your studio practice. How do these two worlds inform or conflict with each other, and do they ever compete for your creative energy?
The prime conflict is for time, and no surprises, whichever line of work pays the most bills wins, and there is always competition.
If my freelance Creative Director work is busy and full on, then art and drawing becomes a process-based practice, so I’ll make drawings or studies purely to clear my mind and practice technique, rather than to begin an expressive project.
This often takes the shape of sketching people in cafes at lunchtimes, drawing people on the train home from a client’s office, or picking up some historic references (I’m a sucker for a Renaissance portrait) and just giving myself a technical challenge. A couple of months back, I picked up a postcard of The Virgin in Prayer by Sassoferrato, which now lives in the back of my sketchbook, and if I need to take my mind off something, I’ll just work on a study of that.
Where do you find inspiration for your subjects, especially when exploring abstract ideas like ‘place’ or identity? Are there specific sources or rituals that fuel your creativity?
Landscape photography is everything, but every image I work from or create has to have at least one person in it. I need to be able to see the figures and wonder what on earth they are thinking, feeling, or talking about, and whether or not the scene they are in can somehow tell a story about where they are in their heads or imaginations.
I’m really not that interested in places without people in them, and I love the notion that people are consistently searching for and finding themselves anew wherever they go.
So this means I take an awful lot of landscape photography – especially on days with interesting cloud patterns which can merge into hillsides, and I’m an absolute sucker for figures on horizons.
In fact, I’ve been working on some pieces inspired directly by a stunning photograph from Alexanda Heybourne, who exhibited at the inaugural Art of PR exhibition in 2024. The image is of two people – we assume a couple, standing, back to back, both of them looking at their phones whilst stood atop of a huge boulder in Dartmoor. I’ve called these works ‘A Day Together’ as it so clearly shows the two people disappearing into the distant worlds of their phone screens.
Looking ahead, what are your creative aspirations—are there new mediums, collaborations, or themes you’re eager to explore beyond cartography?
The next year for me is about experimenting with scale and making bigger, bolder work – still using the linear style I’ve been developing, but rather than using scale to scream loudly, I’ll always want my work to draw people in towards the work and sit closely with it.
Whether or not this means new mediums or formats, I’m yet to discover, but the artistic goal is scale with integrity. From an art business point of view, the challenge is purely about communications and getting my work seen and critiqued, and known by more potential buyers and gallerists.
For the Art of PR exhibition, what can audiences expect from your featured works, and what conversations or emotions do you hope to ignite in viewers?
I hope to give visitors somewhere interesting to let their eyes and imaginations wander and roam, as well as provide some inspiration, stimulus, and a chance to buy some beautiful things.
Personally, I like to inspire a sense of calm and quiet determination through the art I make.
But I think there’s something more important going on with the sheer existence of the Art of PR, which is to show people in the industry that PR and the working world as a whole is a place to meet friends, connections, and collaborators with whom you can achieve things beyond the 9-5. So if the show inspires people to build other common interest groups with people from all parts of the industry, then that’s a win too.
For more details on the Art of PR exhibition, visit the Coningsby Gallery and Occhi Contemporary Art Gallery websites.
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