Jim Stoten draws until it stops being fun, and then he makes music instead. An illustrator, artist and musician splitting his life between Hastings and Venice, he balances commissions for international publishers and brands, Moog Synthesizers, The New Yorker, Nobrow, Lush, VanMoof, with a personal practice that recognises no limits. When image-making gets too mechanical or predictable, he switches mediums to reactivate his own gaze: two vinyl albums on English label Dirty Melody Records (Lights, 2022 and 22, 2024), and two book-length collections of his work, Skotchbook (2021) and the dreamlike Super Road (2025), which gathers drawings, collages, paintings, poetry, animation and film.
At Kinomural he’s premiering his first ever stand-alone short film, All Better, made specially for the festival, and without a single storyboard. Until now he’d only made short animated loops, and he wanted to see whether he could stretch that instinct into a longer form without killing the joy of it. So he didn’t plan. The story built itself as he went, each session shaped by whatever he felt like making next, with a deliberate element of uncertainty kept alive so the whole thing never turned into a chore. The music came the same way: made directly in response to the images, watching the animation back and slowly building a soundscape to match.
