From Architecture to Art: Reclaiming a Lost Part of Myself

For most of my adult life, I knew exactly how to answer the question, “Who are you?”

I was an architect.

I started out in practice in 1985, qualified as an architect in Leeds in 1995, and built my career first in Leeds and then in London for 23 years. For the last 18 of those years, I ran my own practice. By the time lockdown arrived in 2020, I had spent 35 years working in architecture, including 25 years as a fully qualified architect.

Architecture was not just what I did. It was how I saw myself, and how other people saw me too. I had become, in every sense, Matthew the Architect.

And then, during lockdown, that certainty began to unravel.

When architectural work suddenly dried up in 2020, I found myself facing something much bigger than a professional wobble. Without the work that had defined me for so long, I was left asking a question that felt surprisingly difficult to answer:

If I’m not an architect, who am I?

A life shaped by a career

Looking back now, I can see just how completely architecture had taken over my life. It had given me purpose, structure and identity. I had worked hard, built a career I was proud of, and achieved a great deal. But somewhere along the way, I had also allowed my profession to become almost the whole of who I was.

As I began reflecting during that strange and uncertain time, I started thinking properly about the things that had always brought me real pleasure: walking in the countryside, visiting country houses, museums and galleries, reading, historical research, drawing and painting.

Apart from walking, I realised I was doing very little of any of them.

That was quite a thing to admit to myself. I had spent decades being busy, productive and outwardly successful, yet somehow drifted away from many of the things that had once made me feel most like myself.

The self I learned to present

Over time, I began to understand that this was not just about work. It was also about identity.

Growing up gay in a small Yorkshire village in the 1970s, I think I learned quite early on to create a version of myself that felt acceptable. I would not have had those words for it at the time, but looking back, I understand it more clearly now. I also recognise that I grew up with a strong need for approval, and a tendency to shape myself around what other people might find acceptable.

That pattern followed me well into adult life.

In many ways, architecture became the ideal vehicle for that version of me. It was a respected, serious and conventionally masculine profession. I was good at it, and I built an entire identity around it. I do not regret that career for a second, but I can now see that “the architect” also became a kind of armour, a polished, capable persona behind which I could hide.

Returning to something forgotten

In 2018, my husband and I moved from London back to the part of Yorkshire where I had grown up. Then, at the start of lockdown, following my father’s death, I moved back into my family home for a time and started sorting through years of accumulated possessions.

Among them, I unwrapped a watercolour painting I had made in 1985, when I was 18.

It was one of those moments that probably sounds quite small from the outside, but did not feel small at all. Looking at it, I remembered very clearly the pleasure I had once taken in painting and making things. I also realised, with some shock, that I had not painted a single picture since.

Thirty six years had passed without my doing one of the things that had once made me feel most fully myself.

That old watercolour felt like a message from a younger version of me I had somehow left behind.

A message from my younger self?

Discovering that art had never really gone away

Art had mattered a great deal to me when I was young. At school, I had wanted to study A-level art, but because I had not already taken O-level art, I was told I would only be allowed to do it if I completed both O level and A level within the same two year period. I took on the challenge and got an A in both.

Looking back, that probably should have told me something.

After rediscovering my old painting, I began to experiment again. Watercolour came first, followed later by acrylic ink, after a chance meeting at an open studio event opened up new possibilities. The early attempts were tentative and rough round the edges, but they mattered. They were the start of something.

Eventually, in 2022, I found the nerve to begin a full painting. It took several weeks to complete, and I started it with very little confidence. But when I finally stood back and looked at it, I felt something I had not felt for a very long time. It was not just pleasure, but surprise.

My husband was quite emotional when he saw it and said, “That’s amazing. I didn’t know you could paint like that.”
My answer came straight back:
"Neither did I."

That was the real beginning of my life as an artist.

Top of the Village: Where art began again

A new chapter begins

Once I had completed a few more pieces, I started posting them online. A friend in London commented:

“This is excellent. Why have you been pretending to be an architect all these years when you can paint like this?”

It made me laugh, but it also struck a chord.

Since completing that first painting in 2022, while still practising architecture part-time, I have created 21 finished paintings, 11 small studies exploring ideas for larger works, and 5 drawings, alongside sketchbooks and countless rough studies for future paintings. I have also completed 2 commissioned pieces. Over that period, I have sold 18 paintings, including commissions.

There have also been some lovely milestones along the way. In 2023, my painting Into the Light was longlisted for the Jackson’s Art Prize, while Leaving Milner Field won the People’s Choice Vote at the Gargrave Art Exhibition. Since February 2023, I have been represented by Look Gallery in Helmsley. My work has also been exhibited at The Gallery at The Art Shop in Ilkley, in the 2025 Leeds Summer Group Show at Leeds Playhouse, and in the Yorkshire Artists Exhibition at Saltaire Art Gallery. Most recently, I have begun preparing for my first solo exhibition at East Riddlesden Hall, which feels like a particularly meaningful next step.

For someone who had not painted for 36 years, it has all felt encouraging and meaningful, if slightly surreal at times, and has quietly confirmed that this is the right new direction for me.

What architecture taught me

I don’t see my years in architecture as time lost. Far from it.

Architecture taught me discipline, patience and the ability to see both the whole and the detail at once. It trained my eye in composition, atmosphere, structure and balance. It also taught me how to persevere, how to solve problems creatively, and how to keep going when confidence isn’t always there.

All of that has shaped the artist I am becoming.

But while architecture gave me a great deal, art has given me something different. It has given me a way back to parts of myself that had been dormant for many years. It has been healing in ways I could never have anticipated.

Through painting, I’ve begun to understand more about who I am beneath the roles I adopted so successfully for so long. I can see more clearly my old hunger for approval. I can see the ways I made myself acceptable, useful and easy to value. And I can also see that I no longer want to live entirely from that place.

Becoming more fully myself

What began as a rediscovery of painting has turned into something much more meaningful than simply a change of career.

It has been a return.

A return to something I loved before I learned to set it aside.

A return to a more instinctive, honest and creative part of myself.

A return, perhaps, to the person I might have become sooner if I’d felt freer to be him.

My journey from architecture to art hasn’t really been about rejecting one life in favour of another. It has been about bringing things together, the discipline, experience and visual understanding of architecture, with the emotion, intuition and personal truth I’ve found through painting.

In that sense, becoming an artist hasn’t meant ceasing to be the person I was before.

It has meant becoming more fully myself.

If my work speaks to you, whether as a collector, a gallery visitor, or someone interested in commissioning a piece, I would be delighted to hear from you.

Send me a message