Behind the Scenes no.1: being inspired

I had the opportunity to go to art school, but I turned it down. I thought I would probably end up being an art teacher. You could say is that I was insufficiently inspired in the motivational sense, set against the risks of not making it as a pure artist.

The rest of life took over, but I did promise myself to take up painting one day as I say on the  website (www.hedleysmythart). That day turned out to literally be the day I entered semi-retirement. I wanted to paint. I was motivated. I felt there was something in me - thoughts and ideas, more than motivation itself. It was inspiration in the sense of what is in me and comes out through action.

Inspiration is worth dwelling upon. It is more than motivation and stimulus as some dictionary definitions focus upon. Inspiration comes not only in advance of executing, say a painting or writing, but through action, that is the crafting process. Perhaps these thoughts about inspiration will prompt you to think of what inspires you and stimulates you to act on things yet to come into being.

Inspiration comes from thought in advance and in the execution process. This type of inspiration is tangible to individual for it is mentally concrete and made concrete as we act. Of course, its form is not always easy to verbally communicate. It becomes clearer as we act and execute the activity. But even this is far from straightforward. Our thoughts and ideas interact with our bodies as we paint or even interact with other thoughts as we write and the original thoughts are changed, not only intentionally. This may not always please us when our psycho-motive skills – our practice and learning by doing – are insufficiently fine tuned. This may also please us greatly when something better than imagined comes forth!

This type of inspiration is ‘unknown’, certainly in advance, even as we execute something. We may choose to attribute this type of inspiration to our intuition or to our subconscious being; it emerges and takes form as we put pen to paper or brush to canvass. But it can be more than that on occasions although not all the time. It happens when we reflect on a creation by saying something like, “I don’t know where that came from”, or perhaps more precisely, “that seemed to come from nowhere” or “outside myself”, that is seemingly from some external source.

This reminds of the well-known story from Paul McCartney of the Beatles when he woke up with pretty much the whole tune of Yesterday. He played it to John Lennon as he thought it may be something he’d heard and was unconsciously recalling. Lennon said he’d never heard it, and the lyrics were added to the working title of ‘Scrambled Eggs’ to become one of the most played and recorded songs of all time.

What is the external force that inspires us? Each of us will have our own rationale or view on this: perhaps it wasn’t really externally inspired but rises from our own deep recesses, perhaps from some divine creativity explained through our own belief systems or faith. I’m not going to enter that debate, except to assert that I believe this type of inspiration happens from time to time and is typically important; it can set us along new paths of exploration.

I count Rothko as one of the artists who has influenced me in certain ways. I love the subtly layered approach. My own canvasses tend to be layered, especially those on urban atmosphere, albeit in more obvious ways. A layer of paint with newsprint on top, followed by a framework sometimes following the edge echoing the urban infrastructure, then the buildings, lights and billboards, followed by the dripping and splashes to add a layer of seemingly chaotic life with figures or cars typically moving in space.

I was moved by the Tate Modern Rothko retrospective some years ago of his mature work. Some of the work hung in semi-dark spaces giving an almost luminous cathedral window quality to the canvases – fantastic. I was in Oslo a few months back and went to an exhibition of his prints. This has again inspired me given that this last summer proved to be a somewhat dry period for me in contradiction to the wet weather in the UK.

There may be inspiration yet to be realised for you. Although my working career was largely academic, inspiration can really help in writing a journal paper or book, which might seem anachronistic for an activity that seems so rooted in rationality. Inspiration appears in most activities at one time or another, although is more prevalent in creative ones: “There it is!” we may declare as something comes alive. And it’s there from the start if you care to notice it!