On inspiration, nobody says it better than Chuck Close:
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
I live in the suburbs, I’m married, and I have a 9-month-old. I don’t have time to get inspired. When I put my kid down for a nap, I walk into my office and try to make a poem. What I try to do is just have everything ready to go so I can enter at any time and try to make something, quickly—computer desk free of clutter, newspapers and Sharpies ready on the analog desk, etc.
In other words, I don’t need inspiration or motiviation, because I have a routine. (Here’s a great book on the topic.)
More in my book, Steal Like An Artist.
betzistar
