In this feature, each month artists share one thing that excites them creatively.
One key piece to support healthy, productive creativity is stimulating inputs. What kinds of things stimulate the creative centers of the brain? What kind of inputs stimulate us visually? Emotionally? Spiritually? Mentally? Physically?
I’d really like to know, what’s one thing that fills your creative cup? Share with us in the comment section below.
What Inspires You?
Juhli Caldwell
Being creative is not something I have to work at, it is a gift I feel I was born with fully developed. I believe everyone is a creator. Every experience in life for me turns out to have a creative component, from becoming invisible in a bad part of town to arranging flowers for the kitchen table. Artistic creativity, in my own perception, is one of allowing myself to be guided by a higher energy than my ego, of getting out of the way and letting go of forcing to a place of opening up to the creative process.
An example, this morning, as I was sorting through some imperfect computer photo prints, rippping up the ones that were seconds, thinking “this is a shame that I would waste this lovely color” Just because it did not come out right. ( ink had run out and so I replaced the ink and ran it through again, which caused a blurring)- Anyways, something quietly suggested that I might try cutting up the prints and see what comes out. One image had yielded a painting previously that I am still working on and now I could see 3 new images. I developed the images with some ink further, to bring them out and made a note as to what they meant. As I looked at these little images together, they formed a kind of chronology or story.
I mounted these images together in a line using contact cement on heavy white paper and wrote in pencil the meaning of each little image, then placed in a frame.
This I did before breakfast.
Then I photographed the image, posted to my blog and cooked up pasta and eggs Breakfast.
Juhli Caldwell
http://juhlicaldwell.blogspot.
What Inspires You?
Avi Zamir
It makes me feel good to resolve problem of space and color. Seeing other artists work is also inspiring.
Avi Zamir
http://www.flickr.com/photos/
Throughout my career as a painter, I have explored the relationship of the self to the spirit. Recently I’ve used images of dried roses to reflect on ideas related to beauty, loss, and the passage of time. There are some lines in a 1980s song by Leonard Cohen and Jennifer Warnes, Song of Bernadette, that I think capture the part of the human spirit that inspires me most:
We’ve been around, we fall, we fly
Whenever I enter my studio, I am immediately drawn to the window. I never know what awaits there. Will it be a family of deer strolling through the pines as fresh winter snow blankets the landscape? Perhaps, a raccoon will stare at me with curiosity from behind the glass, wondering about my activities, as flowers bloom all around. The other day, I saw a tiny toad trying to take shelter from the rain.
My backyard is such a muse. I can’t get enough of its gifts. Thanks to the studio window, I am able to watch the most delightful and inspirational nature show to never be broadcast on television.
I am inspired by the places we visit. Volcanic stone used in m
One of the things that inspires me is old found papers I gather when I travel to other countries. My use of them in my art is not about sentimentality for the past; rather these ephemera evoke for me a feeling of the passage of time. I often use them with encaustic which provides both protection and a luminous veiled quality.
There is a quote that says, Creativity Takes Courage. I believe that to be true for me as I take an idea and move it through the process until completion no matter how crazy it seems. Visually I am stimulated by the many designs of nature, emotionally by the events of the world, spiritually by the creativity of others, mentally by what I read or think about.
