Inspiration as a noun?

Good Tuesday!

I am writing this on Monday, but I am acutely aware that it is now 11:30 pm and soon it will be Tuesday. I feel like I should be starting these emails off with "dear diary..."

Today I have for you my thoughts on a very common, very often misunderstood concept: Creative Inspiration. So here goes!

I absolutely LOVE the question every artist is asked at least once: "What was your inspiration for this painting?"

And by LOVE I mean loathe.

I don't loathe the question because I think I can't answer it, but rather I can almost always guarantee it's not the answer they're looking for.

There is nothing better than looking at a weird piece of abstract art, saying quietly to yourself what the heck am I looking at? The artist then appears and you overhear (and I say this as an introverted anti-social) someone ask "What WAS your inspiration?!?!?!" You stand there, listening, ready to breathe a sigh of relief when the artists reveals they were inspired by their trip to Paris where they watched the sun set each evening, carefully recording colours and how the last rays of the day made them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. You look back to the paintings and you see those sunshine-y colours and lines that look kind of like rays and you also feel the warm fuzzies so you nod your head, confirming you, too, understand great art. Don't you just love that?

Me neither.

As an outsider, creative inspiration can look many ways, but it is most often received best when it is easily digested; when it makes sense to pretty much everyone. The unfortunate truth is creative inspiration is hardly a thing at all. I wouldn't even say it's a feeling. Sure, you can feel inspired to create, but it kind of means nothing when what you create is neither what you like or what you wanted to create.

Artists often wait for inspiration to hit. Like it's some kind of out-of-control jeep zooming down the highway ready to bless us with its imposition at a moment's notice. It doesn't hit. It doesn't even arrive. Inspiration is, in my opinion, a cop-out, at best. At its worst? It is a lie we tell ourselves about how we come up with our ideas, and it's an excuse for why we don't have any new ones.

Why do we care?

As a creative, you should care because you can learn to cultivate that feeling. You can make it happen when you want it and toss it out the window when you're done. How? Do the stuff. Picasso once said (I think. I know people say he said this but people tell themselves a lot of lies to cope with the steady decline of joy) "Inspiration does exist. But it must find you working."

As an art appreciator or whatever you call yourselves, you should care because it means there are so many other amazing reasons to fall in love with the art an artist creates. Open your mind to their weird and wonderful explanations of their work, and try to see the work through their eyes. And remember to look at the process just as much as the final result.

I feel like visual artists get the short end of the stick here. Writers obviously have immense amounts of ideas they are dealing with, and probably a ton of writer's block too, but they use words to tell you what they're talking about, and they get to be specific and descriptive. And yes, maybe there are some who spend a bit too much time in the realm of the cliché, but the good ones don't!

Visual artists are called out for making paintings that spell it out, so we dive into a hole of symbolism, vague imagery, and cryptic visuals that rarely tell the story we want them to. Then we are told that art is subjective and the viewer will take something else entirely from your piece. So we throw up our hands and say "ok, do what you will with it. It's yours now."

I really have dear-diary'd this, haven't I?

My point is, and I do have one, that artists aren't always inspired to create their works. Some pieces come from pain, heartache, depression, and angst. Some pieces really do come from sunsets and rainbows, which is just as valid. But often there is a lot more going on than even the artist knows, so do yourself a favour and spend time with the work, and don't reach for inspiration as your easily digested explanation.

Understanding great art is about connecting to it and seeing its reasons for existing.

I don't have any great art to share with you today, but I am still working on my website and I am hoping to have it mostly up and running soon, minus a few more intricate parts of it. I also finished a few new pieces this week that I am not ready to reveal yet, but as always, you'll be the first to know when they hit my shop!

Thank you for your continued patience.

xoxo,

Glitter, a hippocampus, and the feeling of success

I have a funny story to tell you today and it involves an absurd amount of glitter and the mention of a hippocampus. It's a long one, but I hope you enjoy. If you're of the blissful crowd unaware, it is Spring Break.<Insert visible shudder here.> I am teaching camps which are always an adventure, but almost always come with some pretty great stories and a lesson or two. I thought that next week would be the week I'd be thinking about the creative process and the whole how-to-be-ok-with-failure thing with the kids since our camp is all about that, but there was a great little moment this week I wanted to share with you. Now, as I mentioned before, there was some glitter. And silly me for not remembering how infectious and unrelenting glitter is in any space, but particularly one filled with 6-year-olds.

We were making some coffee filter jellyfish and despite my efforts to explain otherwise, these kids were using the glitter glue as more of a glue than a glitter. You might be asking yourself whats wrong with that? But please remember:

It was everywhere, and each time I turned around another set of tiny hands were squeezing the bottle with all their strength, with pools of the stuff flooding out over thin, frail coffee filters covered in googly eyes, never missing the chance to cover the table too. It's not often I question my ability to create good quality lessons for these kids, but today was absolutely that day. Anyway, back to the lesson. We were all hopped up on sea creatures, jellyfish being the selection for the morning, but with Hippocampus' fresh in our minds from the day before, the kids were creating some pretty...intense creatures, none of which actually reminded me of jellyfish. I see this all the time: a kid gets a little too stoked on supplies that they forget their idea. They go a little crazy, throwing everything they see into their project and completely forgetting to take a step back and look. Then when they finally do, they realize what a huge mistake it was to put glitter over top of the eyeballs and tentacles coming out of the ears, and they want it fixed. So they come to me. I won't do their art for them. I never have, and I tell them this. But they want me to fix it to make it look more like mine. I try instead to give suggestions, to offer my advice or whatever, but by this point they have basically given up and are ready to throw it in the trash and go back to drawing a puppy or something. And I know these are 6-year-olds and we should expect nothing less, except I know that that feeling isn't going anywhere. It's something we as adults deal with constantly, not just with art but with everything that requires skill and effort. We imagine ourselves as great artists, poets, writers or whatever IF WE ONLY HAD THE SAME TOOLS as that other person who is so so good at it. If I get these $50 pencils. If I buy myself the good laptop to write with. The good piano. The expensive paints meant for REAL artists. But that's the thing: we get caught up in the supplies or the tools when the reality is that being good at anything isn't about the stuff at all. It has always been about the practice. Before I end this long story of silliness, I want to show you my most recent finished painting. It is a painting I've had in my head for over a year and I've sketched it out, and I've played with the idea so many times. And I finally finished it. This issue of living up to our expectations of ourselves is something that hits so close to home for me. I thought up this idea over a year ago and have been essentially hiding from it with the idea that if I don't actually do it, I can say there is always the possibility of it being good, just as much as the possibility of being terrible. Basically a 50/50 chance I will ruin the painting, right? 😉 I get that that'd not how probability works, but you get my drift. So here it is:

I am super duper in love with this piece! So needless to say, sometimes you just have to do the things you want to do to make them a reality. Kids handle the disappointment of failure better in the moment than us adults, but if we spend our whole childhood giving up when things get hard, we do it in adulthood too. And as an adult it's a lot harder to convince yourself to keep going when you keep making trash!

But do it anyway, because boy does it feel good when it works out.

The Ugly Stage of Every Artwork

Last week in my kids art classes I was teaching watercolour. More specifically, we painted a lizard with watercolour.

Here is one of those lizardsNow before I go too far into this story, I should tell you I had previously used these special paints I’d deemed “better” for the kids. I had this delusional idea that semi-wet watercolours would be great for kids. Basically, these are paints that are a sort of paste and never really dry, but you get really vibrant colours so it seemed like a good idea at the time. Keep in mind these kids are young enough to not understand that scooping concentrated paint with a brush and mashing it into the page isn’t actually how you use watercolour; water being the operative part of the word. Now imagine you’re in a classroom with 25 5-10 year-olds and you’ve just given them the go-ahead to paint (or mash) their carefully-drawn lizards with semi-wet watercolours meant for a more developed brain. Now you can kind of see where I went wrong. And to be clear, it’s not that I hadn’t thought of this. I just made the amateur mistake of thinking I could just explain not to do the mashing thing and it would suddenly be a thing of the past. Fast forward to last week when I finally gave up on my dreams and purchases 12 sets of fully dry watercolour paints. Here we were, painting our lizards and happily digging away into the paints, with the kids soon realizing their digging techniques were no match for my new paints! And then the kids started to realize that with less paint comes the need for layers. Watercolour is a special medium in that you need to layer your colours. It is transparent and requires layering wet upon dry before you can really start to see your picture take shape. I’ve spent a great deal of time explaining to kids that art is a process and sometimes there is an ugly stage. But before I could reiterate this, the crying started. I mean, I get that it can be disappointing when you spend 45 minutes drawing a lizard and it looks…well…ugly. But I tell them it’s part of the process and we just keep going!

So that brings me to this weekend. I had started this painting last week in a burst of inspiration and quickly realized the green shorts were looking pretty ugly themselves. I took a break but I was determined to finish the painting whether it remained ugly or not.

Here is the "ugly" stage I was struggling withThe moral of the story is that there is often an ugly stage to the work we do, whether its visual or not. And it can be so ugly we want to throw it aside and start something new and fresh, but if we just hold on and keep building, believing the base we build is strong enough for something to blossom, we might just end up with something beautiful. ​ Or, as I tell the kids, you can throw it out when I’m not looking. 😂