“Where do you get your ideas?" or “How do you find your inspiration?"
These are two questions people often ask. My first thoughts would be “How do I begin to explain?"
I expect every artist has their own views on these questions. Ideas and inspiration are a deeply personal matter, perhaps something of a puzzle to the artist themselves. Though many artists would agree that a full answer would be very complicated to explain to someone who is not an artist, and who has no experience of dealing with ideas.
My own way of working with ideas is to treat them in an anthropomorphic way. I am happy to receive ideas and grateful for them when they arrive, but they can turn up at inconvenient times. Often they come when I have no immediate use for them. So, I like to acknowledge them by recording them in a notebook, to keep them safe for a future time when they can be put to good use. I have a fear that if I just ignore them, they may feel rejected, take offence, and stop coming.
A visual artist may sometimes get the equivalent of writer's block. This happens when an idea is needed for a particular purpose, a design for greeting card, for example, but no suatable idea is readily available; there's nothing useful in the notebooks, and nothing immediately springs to mind that is satisfactory. Then I have the option of abandoning the task and waiting for an idea to come, or I have to go looking for one.
Looking for ideas.
There are, I have found, at least three ways of activly searching for ideas.
One is to pore over my favourite reference books, notebooks, or look through objects I have collected over the years, in this case a box of old greeting cards.
A second approach is to do something else completely in the confidence that an idea will spring out of nowhere. It is a process similar to trying to remember a forgotten name; stop trying to remember it and it will suddenly come to you. Unfortunatly, this can take time, and it is unpredictable, especially if time is short, or a deadline is looming.
The third method is simply to make a start on a drawing with anything that comes into my head, knowing full well that won't be any use. But confident that once I see the lines on the paper in front of me, then useful ideas will emerge. People's brains work in different ways. For some it can be dificult to force ideas into existance. Some brains need the push that only a time with pencil and paper will give. A blank peice of paper is not very inspiring, where do you begin, what do you do first. But once you have made that start and there is something on the paper in front of you, then you have begun. It is easier to addapt what you have in front of you than to imagine something out of thin air.
To start a journey you have to leave your house. If you never leave you will never get anywhere. Once you have left you can then think about where you are going, and decide on the destination.
(Sometimes the first sketches can be used for something else in the future. Never throw away partly finished pictures or half ideas.)
“Which comes first, the painting or the story?"
Ideas for painting seem to come from nowhere; they appear like magic, as if some unknown hand has suddenly turned on a light.A glimmer of an image forms, and it must be recorded before it disappears forever. Forgotten.
There are times when the images turn up without an explanation. They have to be explained while the picture is being painted.
At other times, the story comes first, as with MR James' Count Magnus, or the various other myths and folk stories. Then I work to illustrate the content of the story, with respect for the teller and for the audience.
Sometimes an idea makes its first impression in the form of words or a phrase. One day the words “There are no monsters in this town” drifted into my consciousness. Closely followed by “Uncle Bertie has seen to that”. The idea amused me, and I wrote it down. Later I worked out what the words were about.
The first issue of Curioseum is about the barriers and boundaries we construct to make the world a little more bearable. The cushions we throw about to make things more comfortable. The hopes we cling to that help us escape, however temporary and fleeting that escape may be.
