Nov 22, 2010

A Thought.

“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

5 comments:

  1. Ruah!! you blog!!! How come I never saw i!! Shame on me Everything here is strikingly beautiful!

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  2. Ruah i agree totally with the thoughts above~ if i just get into the studio and start playing around ~ the muse shows up in lots of ways! congratulations on your recent awards and paintings~ i particularly like 'winter light'. : D continued success to you and Yoon~ i didn't know he was a composer! Best wishes for his concert, wish i could be there.

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  3. well said, ruah. i guess waiting for inspiration is a way of procrastinating, deluding yourself. it can almost be selfish. from another angle, sometimes, too often i must admit, i am deluged by inspirations. and that, too, requires getting to work. inspiration can be lovely, but also a terrible distraction.

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  4. Thank you all! These are not my words but a quote from another artist. It caught my attention as my thinking was already accepting the concept, yet I saw that someone put it out in words! For me, on the other hand, inspiration is not necessary but a buddy I like to spend a lot of time with. A luxury so to say. Thankfully, I am very easily inspired. Overdoing things sometimes in life when get carried away, but for art and life inspiration is always a keeper! He-he, 'keeper' is only an expression, it's FREE of course! ...as a cat that comes and goes.

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  5. Thank you Ruah! This is just what I needed :)

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