A few more thoughts about inspiration

I wanted to respond to Angela’s recent post on inspi­ra­tion with a few thoughts of my own. I’m a lit­tle trep­i­da­cious about doing that because it’s her first real post here and I don’t want to give the impres­sion of crit­i­cism. Nor do I intend to become a weird sort of troll by com­ment­ing on every­thing posted here on “my” blog. But I do want to con­trast her ideas with my own. Essen­tially, she’s inspired me to respond.

My view of inspi­ra­tion is a bit dif­fer­ent than Angela’s. I agree that good paint­ings are largely about com­mu­ni­cat­ing emo­tional ideas. But I don’t find that hav­ing an active emo­tional expe­ri­ence as I am cre­at­ing art is very help­ful. Just as a writer can cre­ate an emo­tional story with­out need­ing to scream the words as she types them, the job of a painter is to decide what emo­tional response he wants to com­mu­ni­cate and then fig­ure out how to make a pic­ture that accom­plishes that effect in the viewer. Slam­ming paint onto the can­vas doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate pas­sion to the viewer, it com­mu­ni­cates sloppiness.

So to me the process is more intel­lec­tual. Say I am com­pos­ing a still life, for exam­ple. I look for objects that mean some­thing to me, such as an old pair of blue jeans. I think about whether that mean­ing is some­thing that I can com­mu­ni­cate in paint (lots of things can’t be expressed that way). I think about what kind of response I want in the viewer and how to accom­plish that. What size and for­mat? What com­po­si­tion? Low chroma, high chroma, or some com­bi­na­tion? Do I care if it’s “pretty?” Anal­o­gous or com­ple­men­tary color scheme? Oil paint or some other medium? High fin­ish or loose paint? Alla prima or mul­ti­ple lay­ers? These kinds of deci­sions are not easy to make in a fit of artis­tic pas­sion, but they are crit­i­cal to achiev­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the per­son who will be look­ing at the paint­ing. If it doesn’t speak to that per­son (or at least some peo­ple), I haven’t done my job.

Of course, this isn’t the only way to paint. Some peo­ple such as (appar­ently) Angela, work in a more intu­itive fash­ion. Any route to a good paint­ing is OK as far as I am con­cerned. But I per­son­ally don’t know how to make a good paint­ing with­out putting a lot of thought into it.