Skip to main content

Inspiration

Is it a formula? Is it a trick of the light?  Does it come from emptying out or filling up? Is it brought about by chance, exercise, time alone or time together?  What gets your motor running when it comes to creative projects?  This recent article in the The Guardian by Laura Barnett features 20 creative people from the worlds of culture, art, music, film and theatre answering the same question: what gives you creative inspiration?

My favourite answer is by Wayne McGregor, Choreographer
-Do    
-Empty    
-Panic  
-Forage  
-Generate 
-Embody     
-Edit    
-Decide   
-Persist 
-Practise

I like these ones too:

 I go through messy phases and tidy phases. Being messy during a tidy phase is never good, and vice versa. -Susan Philipsz, artist

Don't wait for a good idea to come to you. Start by realising an average idea – no one has to see it. If I hadn't made the works I'm ashamed of, the ones I'm proud of wouldn't exist. -Polly Morgan, artist


Get an alarm with a long snooze function and set it early. Shallow-sleep dreams have been the source of many of my best ideas (sadly, small children are no respecters of prospective genius). -Rupert Goold, director

The little images that I get from sitting alone in my apartment – the way the light is falling through the window; the man I just saw walk by on the other side of the street – find their way into snatches of lyrics. I write in short spurts – for five, 10, 15 minutes – then I pace around the room, or go and get a snack.  -Martha Wainwright, singer-songwriter


As for me, I guess I'd have to say, a clean kitchen,accompanied by sunshine streaming onto the table puts me in a good head space for creating things.  Walking to work lets me process things inside my head and hold onto those half-remembered dreams.  My number one source of inspiration is observing my kids' approach to creative projects.

How about you?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.

Fists full of lettuce

 It is a pot of a variety of lettuce plants. It was planted by my mom.  She has been living with Stage 4 bile duct cancer for at least 1.5 years (that we know of, probably a lot longer).  Standing and gardening are becoming harder as time goes on. She learned about gardening from her dad as a kid and kept on gardening every year of her adult life.  Sometimes the gardens were tiny or rudimentary, but with the help of my dad , they have become major and, at times elaborate, growing projects over the years.  Now it is a collection of raised beds and regular beds that hold a host of plants, vegetable and flowers. Something that was clear that first spring with Stage 4 cancer is that gardening would continue in a big way, cancer or no cancer.  It was important to order the seeds and start them inside and get them planted outside, no matter what. Spending time together in the summer with cancer now consistently involves gardening and following instructions. Plant...

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...