Inspirational Quote of the Day
By Chuck Close, American painter.
Via the art blog DRAWN (via some other blogs):
“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. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and somthing else that you reject will push you in another direction. 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.” Chuck Close
I’ve certainly been guilty of sitting around, waiting for lightning to strike.
I’ve been guilty of it too, even though I’ve always believed exactly what Close said. I don’t always follow my own advice. That said, there are times I do get to work on something and give it up because I get uninspired with my idea and abandon it. If it’s no fun battling to get my art idea to work, I quit on it. Sometimes — but not always — I get back to it and get it to work.
He hit that nail right on the head! Color me guilty of this one too! He’s right though…just get drawing…something always comes up…
Great advice from one of my favorite painters. The Cleveland Museum of Art has one of his fantastic portraits but unfortunately I don’t think it is currently on display.
Of course, this not always works when you have a deadline. If you could really just sit down whenever you think of an idea, and develop it to completion – rather than having to keep a schedule, I mean – the world would be a very different place.
I totally agree with Chuck. If you work continuously and even methodically then ideas just ‘come’, some of them go to bin, some of them evolve into something really worthy. Thanks for sharing the quote! 🙂