Where does your inspiration come from?

So many artists complain of sitting in front of a blank canvas and not knowing where to start, while so many viewers of my artworks wonder how I went from that blank canvas to the finished piece.

Thus, the question I want to explore in this month’s blog is: “Where does inspiration come from?”

I could answer it in a single word: “everywhere”. That would obviously make both a very short and very unhelpful blog post, so let me show you just how you can get inspired by anything, anywhere, any time in some examples of my own work.

In the item in November’s newsletter about my entries in the upcoming “Christmas Collection” exhibition, one of them was this soft pastel drawing of a robin on the rockery in my garden.

The story behind that drawing was that a few weeks ago I was in the garden doing a bit of cutting back and tidying up while my two dogs were playing around me. I had not been there long before I heard a familiar sound and some rustling in the trees a few yards away: my little robin friend had arrived.

I confess that I have no idea if it is the same robin but this scenario happens most times that I go out into the garden these days. He’s very sweet and sits on a nearby branch or fence and chirps away; I talk back to him and he puts his head on one side to listen then chirps away a bit more. I love it, and even my two boisterous young dogs bouncing round the garden doesn’t put him off.

This particular day he hopped down onto the rockery just inches away from where I was sweeping leaves off the path. I couldn’t resist it, and took my phone out. I fully expected that he would have flown off before I’d switched on the camera but I thought ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained’. He didn’t fly off and I took a few photos; then he hopped onto another stone and I took a few more.

I hadn’t gone out into the garden to look for inspiration for a picture; I had no particular intention of doing a drawing of a robin, and even when I took the photos I wasn’t thinking of turning them into an artwork. However, when I looked at the photos later on that day and recalled my friendly, feathered visitor I was inspired to use him in a painting or drawing.

Because I use the 5 basic media of watercolours, oils and acrylics for paintings and soft pastel and pencil for drawings, I can look at my subject and work out what medium, or mix of media, would best depict it. In the case of the robin, he had soft, fluffy feathers on his chest and the sharp-edged wing and tail feathers, while his location included the hard rockery stones encrusted with soft moss. They all suggested a drawing in soft pastel rather than a painting in any of those 3 media.

Of course, it isn’t always me that has the initial inspiration. Sometimes it’s my patrons who are inspired by something and they commission me to turn that inspiration into a finished work of art for them. This leaping hare sculpture is one such example.

Day after day, my favourite patron would walk past this black metal sculpture of a hare leaping over a disc (could be sun or moon) in a hotel in Basel in Switzerland. She wasn’t going round this hotel looking for inspiration for her latest commissioned work of art but there was something really inspiring about this sculpture so she took a photograph of it and sent it to me. “Can you make a painting out of it with the hare but without the tables and chairs in the background?” she asked. “It’s a bit mad but I trust your judgement and artistic skills – you are my ‘go to’ artist.”

Even without the flattering build up, it was great fun as well as inspiring to take the shape of the leaping hare and the idea of the sun or moon disc being placed in just the right position for him to appear to be leaping over it and bring the two to life in a dramatic landscape. I went back to her and asked if she preferred the idea of a red setting sun or the blues and golds of moonlight and she chose the latter. “Hare by Moonlight” is the result.

As an artist I am lucky enough to be able to switch almost instantly to the creative thinking processes of the right hemisphere of the brain and to the artist’s way of seeing things. It’s that right hemisphere way of seeing that looks up into the sky and, instead of just seeing clouds, sees a poodle lying on his back juggling a ball, or a polar bear chasing a dragon.

Talking of clouds, as I was getting to the end of our usual daily walk I was waiting for Ezra to finish investigating some obviously highly inspiring scent on the pathway and I looked up: the cloud patterns and the way the sunlight bounced off them were inspiring. Out came the camera and a series of photos became this cloudscape: “End of Walkies”.

The left-brain thinking mode is the time-centred, logical, organised mode that pigeon-holes all the masses of information constantly being bombarded at us throughout the day and allows us to cope. We can’t go through our daily lives constantly in ‘right brain’ thinking mode or we’d never get anywhere, but it’s like my right brain is ticking over in the background and when it sees something inspiring it is able to signal some alert ‘siren’ that grabs my attention.

If I go through some of the back catalogues of my work and recall the inspiration behind these works, very rarely was I deliberately setting out to find something inspiring to work on.

For instance, a walk in the Normandy spa town of Bagnoles De l’Orne with a friend who was visiting us in autumn became this scene in acrylics on canvas:

Looking at last year’s Harvest Supermoon in the garden inspired this work in watercolour:

It can be a mixture of inspiration, reality and imagination: in this instance, winter brought in the first flakes of snow as we were recalling a visit to Rufford Old Hall in the summer months. Those two things combined to inspire this wintery scene of how the Tudor hall might look under a blanket of the white stuff.

Sometimes the inspiration is words rather than images. Reminiscing about our childhood in southern Africa, specifically our years spent in the Kalahari Desert in South West Africa, inspired this painting.

Done in tinted charcoal paints and watercolours it shows a trio of gembok on those sand dunes as the brilliant star-studded midnight blue sky gives way to the first touches of golden sunlight at the start of another blazing hot desert day. Happy childhood memories brought to life.

It’s not just my inspiring memories that I can bring to life on a canvas. We’ve already seen how Susie’s fascination with the hare sculpture inspired the “Hare by Moonlight” painting, and in the same way, hearing a friend recalling with touching tenderness his favourite childhood days of going fishing with his dad inspired this oil painting.

Of course you can go out hoping to find something inspiring to paint – such as when you go out painting ‘en plien air’ – but even then you don’t know what is going to inspire you . . . you just hope that something will!

An example of looking for inspiration but not knowing where it might pop up, is this watercolour painting called “My Obliging Cygnet”.

I had gone, camera in hand, to one of our beautiful botanic gardens in my hometown of Southport in Merseyside, to look round for something inspiring when I caught sight of some swans gracefully gliding down the streams that meander around the grounds. I always love swans so I was happily photographing them, enjoying their company and thinking that some day I might need some reference pictures of swans – I do tend to think of my camera as an instant sketchbook.

I wandered along a bit further looking at the patterns and shapes of light and shade, and a cygnet of an age where he looked like he was approaching adulthood and independence glided past me. I then saw a perfect shape created by a dark tree reflected in the water and was inspired by the image it would create if the swan would swim across that reflection giving a brilliant contrast to the pure white of the swan’s neck. The only trouble was that he was swimming off in the wrong direction!

I stood there willing him to turn round and swim back towards me, and a split second later he did just that! I saw him turn around so I pointed my camera at that tree reflection and, as my obliging cygnet swam across that reflection, I pressed the shutter. I had my inspiration so I didn’t bother to take any more photos, I came straight home and got my paints out.

GET INSPIRED IN TIME FOR CHRISTMAS

If these examples have inspired you, then there might just be time to get a commissioned painting done as an inspiring Christmas gift for you or someone special to you. Perhaps it could be a place that has a special meaning for you both (where you met, where you proposed, went on honeymoon, etc) or it’s a portrait of that person who inspires you, or their pet?

Whatever inspires you, get in touch for a chat and we can see about turning that inspiration into reality in time for the festive season. Otherwise, something that has inspired me to put paint brush to canvas could become your inspirational gift choice!