Inspiration Finds You Working.

I always hated this sentiment. Creative block is so very real for me. This leads us back to the classic chicken or the egg conundrum. And I hate to admit that there is some truth to it. Creativity feeds on creativity. This week I was itching to paint something and could not for the life of me find any excitement in the ideas I had. Usually, this sends me into a panic Pinterest spiral that can last for days, sometimes weeks. I instead pulled out an old abandoned canvas and stared at it for about half an hour before deciding that I should just start painting. The canvas was already “ruined”. I had nothing to lose. After some debate i began painting a cloudscape, something that I have never done before. Just to see what would happen. I didn’t film the process, thinking that this was likely to be a huge flop, so why waste my time. In three hours, I had finished a painting that I actually loved. And what do you know? Today, I am planning two more cloudscapes. Inspiration really does find you, but never when you’re chasing it.

I have always kind of envied the artists working in a niche because their next painting is always a stone’s throw away from their last. But this just isn’t how my creative practice works. After spending a lot of time collecting art advice, the most common thing I find is people saying, “find your niche and create consistency so that your collectors know what to expect”. I probably would, if I could, but my creative flow follows the dopamine, and that looks different from day to day. In the last few years i have gotten better at exploring themes and creating more cohesively but its a fickle game.

In 2023, I completed my first series. I had just celebrated my 30th birthday, and my sentimentality led to my inner child series, where I transformed my old childhood photos to explore ideas about adulthood and the passage of time. I really fell in love with the process. In the years since, I have found myself searching for the next series that I want to explore but have not yet found that thing that fuels the exploration of one singular topic.

As an artist, I have become dependent on that high that only comes when you’re in your creative flow. So, in my inspirational lulls, I find myself desperately looking for “that thing”. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t work that way. The fastest way out of a creative slump is just to do something. Maybe that means you take a gamble and try something you have never done before, a new medium perhaps. Maybe that means you make a bunch of really terrible drawings. But I think the secret sauce to this recipe is that you get to “work” by committing to “play”. Echoing Oscar Wilde’s sentiment, art is one of those things that is too important to be taken seriously.

I learned a lot about inspiration from Rick Rubins book, The Creative Act. Inspiration is a practice of collecting small bits of data from the world around you. You find it in the books you read, the songs birds sing, the way the sun hits the trees at golden hour, and in all the seemingly mundane moments of everyday life. It’s not something that you can funnel into existence. The more you look for it, the less you find. Inspiration comes from living and being truly present in all of your experiences. Inspiration finds you when you’re playing. It finds you when you’re deeply engaged in the act of the human experience.