"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."
-Chuck Close
I read this quote the other day and I do
believe Mr. Close hit the nail squarely on the head
I guess if you have no need or desire to learn
to be a better painter, you can wait for inspiration to hit but if you want to
be a good painter you paint! You paint
when you’re excited about a new idea.
You paint when you haven’t a clue what you want to paint. You paint when you are feeling full of piss
and vinegar and you paint when you feel like crap!
A couple of days ago, I woke up after a really
lousy night’s sleep and the very thought of standing at the easel with a
paintbrush in my hand was, in a word, unappealing. Still, I looked through all my photos…and my
facebook friends’ photos, too…. in a vain search for ‘inspiration.’
It never showed up.
So, like I do every other morning, I opened my
paint box, put a new canvas on my easel and picked up a brush. Using the leftover paint on my palette, I began.
It wasn’t complicated.
I put paint on the brush and put that paint on
the canvas. I smeared it around
some. Next, I picked up another leftover
color and repeated the process.
This is the result.
It is one of my favorite paintings I’ve done
lately….begun with no inspiration and no real desire to even paint.
I have learned to trust the process. I have learned that I will make a good
painting or a bad one but in either case, I will have learned something. I will have grown in skill.
And that is inspiring.
My paintings are available at:
