“Inspiration is for amateurs ? the rest of us just show up and get to work.
“. . . things will grow out of the activity itself and that you will ? through work ? bump into other possibilities and kick open other doors that you would never have dreamt of if you were just sitting around looking for a great ?art idea’.”
The first part of this quote is the one I’ve mostly seen; the second part is just as important.
If you wait around for inspiration to hit you, will you know what to do with it when it does? If you’re busy painting and drawing and creating while you wait for the bolt of inspiration to strike, you’ve already done the stretching and warmups so can start running with it straight away when it hits.
You may not be producing results that delight you in the meantime, but you are building muscle memory, getting more familiar with your materials and things such as brushstrokes and colour mixing becoming more intuitive and instinctive.
Inspiration should find you working when it arrives.
Thank you for sharing a further quote by Chuck Close. That affirmation came at a perfect time and encourages me to keep doing what I’m doing – I have 4 mixed media works on the go, all in the very early stages – But rather than trying to finish one then move to another (as advised by some people around me), something propels me to work in what seems to be a disorganized manner — but I am slowly beginning to realize that these works are all feeding off each other thus generating new ideas, even though the design/subject matter of each one are quite different.
Gayle, Your comment got me thinking about how I don’t either do one thing at a time. Ended up writing a blog about it here…
Thank you Marion – I was very happy that my comment inspired your latest blog. In the past 2 years, I’ve been enriched by the creative and life experiences so generously shared by bloggers such as yourself. Such a privilege it is to be a part of this virtual tribe and to realize that art, in whatever form, is definitely a force for good!
I love the interaction with online friends, people from around the world, and am creatively richer for it!
That is a great quote! Just getting down to it goes a long way to dispel the artistic angst about doing art, too.
Jude