Joe Giles has been painting professionally for little more than a year.
There has been no art school, no carefully planned emergence and no decade spent quietly preparing a first collection. There was simply a point at which several of the fixed parts of his life gave way at once.
A relationship ended. He lost his job. He had to leave the city-centre apartment he loved. He found himself living alone in Manchester, without much of a community around him.
Then he picked up a paintbrush.
“I’ve painted on and off all my life,” he says. “I’ve always been creative in some way, whether that was music, writing plays at college, skits or sketching. But I’d never had it as a career.”
For approximately 15 years, Giles worked in architecture and business development. Painting initially arrived not as a professional strategy but as somewhere to put everything that had happened.
“I found myself in Manchester by myself. I didn’t really know anybody. Then I picked up painting and thought: wow, this is my thing. This is my therapy. This is a way I can express myself.”
He showed the early works to friends. And their reactions surprised him.
“They were saying, ‘I’m not just telling you this because I’m your friend, but this is really good.’”
He began sharing the paintings on Instagram. Group exhibitions followed. Then sales.
One prospective buyer contacted him through social media and visited Giles’s apartment intending to purchase a single work. He left with seven.
“That was when I thought: this is really something.”
Giles estimates that he has completed around 40 paintings during his first year. He has already appeared in four group exhibitions, attracted enquiries from overseas and begun discussing possible solo shows.
At 35, he has decided that this will become his life. “Now it’s full steam ahead until it generates enough money for me to leave my job,” he says. “That’s where I want to go.”
Freedom is an important word in Giles’s work, although for much of his life it was something he understood principally by its absence.
He grew up inside what he describes as a highly controlling religious community. Its influence extended through family life, school, employment, friendships, relationships, clothing, music and contact with the outside world.
We don't need to identify the organisation. Giles says its members were expected to remain within strict religious and social boundaries, with individual expression frequently treated as disobedience.
“I always had a big problem with obedience,” he says.
“The environment I grew up in was very authoritarian. You weren’t expected to think for yourself. You did as you were told. I struggled with that as a kid, as a teenager and throughout my twenties.
“I was always getting into trouble for being disobedient. People would ask: ‘Why can’t you just obey?’ But I’m a free thinker. I’m creative and expressive. I want to travel the path less taken. I’ve always struggled with being told what to do and being put into a box.”
The restrictions included matters that might appear trivial from outside but which, accumulated across a childhood and early adulthood, controlled the visible expression of individuality.
Men wore white or pale-blue shirts, dark trousers and black shoes. Facial hair was not permitted. Neither were cufflinks, brown shoes or coloured socks.
Homes looked similar. Cars looked similar. The available music came from inside the community. Eating or drinking socially with people outside it was prohibited.
“There was no colour,” Giles says. “There was no expression.”
His resistance to authority did not sit easily within that world. He describes himself as a difficult pupil and was expelled from school several times. The rebelliousness evident in the adult painter was already present in the child, although it had nowhere constructive to go.
“Freedom wasn’t something I knew,” he says. “There was no freedom of expression, speech or thought. We were told what to do. You couldn’t do anything beyond those very strict parameters.”
At 28, Giles was excommunicated.
He had grown up within the community’s education system, worked for one of its businesses and expected eventually to marry within it. He had few meaningful relationships in the world beyond it.
Then, suddenly, there was an entire life to choose.
“I could be whoever I wanted to be,” he says. “I could be a journalist. I could be an artist. I could go scuba diving in Cambodia. I could do anything.”
The revelation was exhilarating. It was also overwhelming.
“I was discovering the normal world, as you would know it, through an adult’s eyes.”
Leaving came at immense personal cost. Giles has not seen his mother and sisters for seven years. But the person who emerged into the wider world also began to discover the tastes, ambitions and possibilities that had previously been decided for him.
“I didn’t even know abstract art was a thing,” he says. “Now I’m an abstract artist. It’s a full-circle moment.”
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Giles’s paintings do not whisper.
They move through vivid fields of colour, layered and interrupted by marks, shapes, abrasions and decisive black lines. Their surfaces appear instinctive and emotionally immediate, but structures recur: grids, divisions, frameworks and boundaries.
Some of that visual language, Giles believes, may come from the old instinct towards control.
“I have to fight against myself when I’m creative,” he says. “I’m an intuitive painter. I paint what I feel and let the painting dictate where it needs to go next.”
Yet biography is only one influence. The lines also carry the accumulated memory of a career spent in architecture: technical drawings, plans, forms, diagrams and spatial relationships.
“That feeds into it as well,” he confirms. “I take inspiration from unusual patterns and diagrams that I’m looking at.
“But breaking free is something I’m working through with the art. It’s a discovery for me as much as it is for the viewer.”
It would be easy - and reductive - to interpret every boundary in the paintings as a religious rule and every eruption of colour as an act of escape.
Giles is clear that his upbringing shaped him. He is equally clear that it should not become the only explanation for either the artist or his work.
“I don’t want to be defined by my past,” he says.
“It wasn’t an experience I asked for or signed up for. At the same time, it has consciously shaped who I am. It has influenced my personality. But I don’t want to be known as the ex-cult guy.”
He laughs at the phrase and briefly considers its potential as a T-shirt. The joke matters. It is another small refusal to let the story become solemn, fixed or owned by somebody else.
Giles rarely begins a painting with a completed composition in mind.
There might be the suggestion of an idea, but it seldom survives contact with the canvas. He starts with large brushstrokes and observes what happens as colours and forms meet.
Then comes the point at which the painting appears to have failed.
“I look at it and think: this is rubbish. What is this?”
He continues.
“There might be one part I like, but something elsewhere that I hate. There’s a lot of tension. What do I do with that? Normally, I go against what I think. If I don’t like something, I’ll do more of it. Sometimes it balances itself out.”
Several paintings may be in progress simultaneously. When one refuses to move, he turns it towards the wall and begins or resumes another. Days or weeks later, a change in weather, music, mood or surroundings may allow him to see the earlier work afresh.
Occasionally, he paints over a surface entirely.
“You’re not actually starting from scratch,” he says. “There’s a history there already. There is colour, texture and light underneath, and some of it comes through.
“It isn’t a blank canvas. It has a past.”
Knowing when to stop is a problem familiar to every abstract painter. Giles has developed his own test.
“For me, it’s finished when I look at it and think: I would buy that. If I would buy it, then it’s done.”
Some paintings reach a point at which every element appears to work, yet something remains absent. He may have to leave the piece, return and make one final, drastic intervention.
“Then - boom. That’s it. Finished.”
Two of Giles’s most important paintings, Dark Night of the Soul and The Morning After, were created alongside one another.
Visually, they appear to come from different worlds.
Dark Night of the Soul is deep, nocturnal and intense. Its anchoring form is a vivid red disc, burning against the darker surface.
For Giles, the disc represents the soul.
“What is the soul?” he asks. “Where is it in us? Is it out there? What is it? Where does it belong? We can’t see it and we don’t really know what it is.
“That red dot is the anchor of the piece. It draws your eye. For me, the soul is something very deep. It’s red and glowing, like a hot iron. There is something burning that needs to be addressed and thought through.
“It’s the night, and you’re awake with your soul. It’s keeping you awake. It’s this glowing thing that needs attention.”
Much of the painting was made late at night, sometimes around three in the morning, with Pink Floyd playing while Giles worked.
“It expresses something I can’t particularly articulate.”
The Morning After carries a much paler, pastel palette. From a distance, it seems calmer. Closer inspection reveals something less resolved.
“In some ways, it’s almost more intense,” Giles says. “There’s quite a lot of tension in it.
“But for me, it’s the morning. The sun comes up and you have a new day ahead. Things are a bit calmer. Even when you’re going through a difficult period, there is something very special about first waking up and having a coffee.
“You might have a lot to deal with. Life isn’t perfect. But nothing has happened yet that morning.”
The titles often arrive after the paintings. Giles lives with a completed work, sometimes for a week, until a phrase reveals its relationship with the state of mind from which it emerged.
Some names carry profound personal significance. Others come from books, conversations or associations formed while he was painting.
Once the work enters an exhibition, however, its meaning no longer belongs solely to him.
A painting made while Giles was reading the sprawling novel Shantaram inherited its title. For him, its energy suggested rebellion, danger, adventure and passion. Viewers encountered something entirely different.
“They would say: ‘I feel really peaceful when I look at this.’
“But it’s abstract. It’s not for me to tell the viewer how it should be interpreted.”
When someone asks what a particular painting means, Giles prefers to begin by returning the question.
“What do you think? What interests you about it?”
In Refuse to Be Tamed, black lines impose themselves across fields of colour.
They are barriers, Giles says: frameworks, rules and authority attempting to direct and contain. But the colour does not obey.
“It pushes against the lines,” he explains. “It refuses to be tamed. It’s saying: you are there, and you might have control over other people, but you don’t have control over me.”
The painting would appear to be among the clearest expressions of Giles’s journey. Yet he does not particularly like it.
When selecting pieces for an exhibition, Refuse to Be Tamed rarely makes the cut.
“There’s something unresolved about it,” he says. “I don’t know what. I reject it somehow, energetically. I like it as a work, but there is something about it.”
It is an extraordinary response to the painting. The work that most explicitly declares its independence remains the one its creator cannot entirely accept.
Perhaps resistance is not a single triumphant act. Perhaps freedom, once obtained, must still be negotiated with the parts of ourselves formed when it was absent.
Giles does not offer that interpretation. Nor should we impose it upon him. The tension remains where it belongs: alive within the painting.
Giles’s largest work measures approximately five feet by four.
We Were Fools to Believe contains figures that he did not plan. On one side, three stick-like people appear to leap from something fiery. On the other is a form resembling an angel, holding what might be a sun.
The figures represent Giles, his brother and one of their closest friends, all of whom left the religious community.
“I don’t really know what it means,” he says. “The side where they are is red and fiery. The other side is green, pastel and calm. They’re moving towards it. It is like they’re jumping out of the fire.”
The uncertainty is important. The images have emerged before their maker has fully explained them to himself.
The title, suggested by his brother, places the work in conversation with a shared past. But the painting’s figures are moving. Whatever they once believed, they are not remaining inside the fire.
Another work, The Shape of Nearly, carries a rather different buried history.
Giles also experiments with figurative painting. While dating a woman, he began painting her. The relationship ended before the piece was successful, so he covered the figure and made an abstraction over it.
The woman has disappeared from view but is still physically present beneath the painted surface.
“The final surface reflects something about that,” he says. “There’s something not quite connected.”
Once again, this is not a blank canvas. Something almost realised - a portrait, a relationship, a possible future - remains inside it.
The speed of Giles’s progress inevitably introduces the marketplace.
His most common canvases, usually around a metre by 80 centimetres, have been selling for approximately £850. Larger works command more. He has received an enquiry about a commission from Miami and is increasingly learning how to balance production, exhibitions and direct sales.
Instagram has served simultaneously as gallery, introduction service, community noticeboard and shop window.
Giles is not naïve about the commercial side. His background in business development and sales gives him skills that many emerging artists have to acquire painfully. He knows how to present work, speak in public, build relationships and approach galleries.
He is also alert to the tension between artists and the traditional gallery model: substantial commissions, lengthy waits for payment and no certainty that representation will lead to exhibitions.
He would consider working with the right gallery, but has already seen artists develop international markets without conventional representation.
The challenge is keeping those calculations away from the moment of creation.
“There are two very different sides,” he says. “There’s the business side and there’s the painting side.
“When I’m creating, I’m painting for myself. If you start thinking too much about whether people will like it or whether it will sell, that interrupts the creative side.”
That separation may be one of the reasons the paintings have connected so quickly with viewers.
“I never think about how the work will be perceived,” he says. “I follow my intuition. I paint what I want to paint. There isn’t a single part of me thinking about how the outside world will see it while I’m creating.
“The work ultimately becomes commercial, unfortunately. But I try to keep the act of creation sacred.
“This is me and the canvas. I can’t let any of that noise become involved.”
When Giles arrived in Manchester, he knew few people. Painting has given him not only a practice but a community.
Through Heads Collective and Heads Gallery, which provided his first group exhibition, he began meeting other artists. Invitations and introductions led him further into the city’s creative networks: painters, fashion designers, photographers, stylists and makers working across disciplines.
“I couldn’t be in a better place to start an art career,” he says.
“The people I’ve met and the events I’ve been to have been amazing. I love being around artists and hearing them talk about their work. The way they think and see the world is fascinating.”
A city that initially represented isolation has become the place where Giles is assembling his new tribe.
That network is particularly important for a self-taught artist. Giles admires Basquiat and Keith Haring - both for their work and for their refusal to seek permission. He cites Frank Bowling as an important abstract influence and sees something closer to his own visual language in contemporary painter Megan Rooney.
But his education is happening everywhere: in exhibitions, conversations, online films, social media and the experience of standing in front of other people’s paintings.
Artists who meet him are often startled to learn how recently he began.
His architectural career has given him experience of presentations and public speaking. Yet talking about his art feels different. At an event attended by around 100 artists, he found himself speaking without nerves.
“I find it easy to talk about the work,” he says. “People assume from that that I’ve been doing it for years.”
Most of Giles’s work has so far been made in acrylic, a medium suited to the speed and physicality of his process.
“Acrylic is very fast, and I work very fast,” he says. “I put down layers, go over them and put things back.”
More recently, he has begun experimenting with oil paint.
Oil demands something different. Its long drying time resists the pace to which he is accustomed. It can be moved, merged and manipulated on the surface in ways acrylic cannot.
“It’s a very different energy,” he says. “You have to slow down. But you can merge colours together on the surface, which is beautiful. I think I’ll move further towards it.”
The darker depth of Dark Night of the Soul, one of the few oil paintings he has completed, suggests what that slower medium might open.
But Giles is wary of exchanging one set of boundaries for another.
“I hope I never put myself or my practice into a box,” he says. “I want to keep trying things and keep pushing.”
The first body of work was about expression, colour, love and release.
Now Giles senses a change.
The paintings are becoming simpler and more restrained. Their subject matter may also be moving outwards, from his own experiences towards wider philosophical, cultural and political concerns.
A recent work called Oppression began with a passage from George Orwell’s Animal Farm pasted directly onto its surface.
“My art journey is a direct reflection of my own journey,” he says. “The new pieces are becoming a little more philosophical. Until now they’ve been very much about my experience, but there are things I care about in the world that might begin to bleed into them.”
He has not planned the transition.
“I only noticed recently that they were becoming simpler. I don’t know where it will go. I’m as surprised as anybody else.”
The immediate ambition is practical. Giles needs a studio.
His apartment has carried the first year’s extraordinary burst of work, but he wants room for larger canvases and several projects in development at once. Manchester’s old mills contain the kind of spaces he imagines, although affordable studios are heavily subscribed.
Within the next year, he hopes to leave salaried employment, paint full-time and work at a greater scale.
There is confidence in that ambition, but also wonder.
“If I hadn’t had those experiences - all that loss and coercive control - I might never have discovered this,” he says.
That does not mean suffering was necessary, nor that it should be romanticised as the price of creativity. The work is not valuable because Giles experienced pain. It is valuable because of what he is able to make.
Sometimes, he stands before a completed painting and encounters it almost as a stranger might.
“Without sounding too grandiose, I look at my work and think: I can’t believe I made that.”
He paints almost every day. When there is no major canvas in progress, he makes small studies in a sketchbook, testing how colours react, how textures accumulate and what might happen next.
For most of his life, Joe Giles was expected to remain within lines drawn by other people.
Now there is the artist, the canvas and the freedom to make a mark without asking how it will be received.
The colours can go wherever they like.
