I recently ran across this great quote from artist Chuck Close in the book Wisdom:
“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… 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.”
While I agree with this from a practical work ethic standpoint, at the same time we have all felt genuine inspiration and it’s such a source of power. Even Chuck does not deny its existence.
Inspiration is powerful in two ways. First, it helps us discover what matters to us — the emotional response to something we find inspirational reveals what’s important to us thematically and aesthetically. We often then find ourselves reaching most ambitiously in directions we have been inspired in some way.
