Patterns

There are a ton of patterns all around us everyday. Most of us probably think fabrics like the pattern on the shirt we wore yesterday or the pattern on the curtains in the kitchen (and those can be great places to look for inspiration) but what about the subtle patterns that we tend to forget about? Next time you're in a building with tiled floors, just take a minute to look at the pattern on the floor and look at it from differnt angles (would an ant see the pattern the same way you do, would they see it at all?). Or go look at the inticate patterns on the leaves or petals of a plant; nature's patterns are some of the most beautiful and stunning.

Try This

Take a look at the picture below and make a list of at least 20 words or phrases that come to mind while you're looking at it. Don't limit yourself to things that describe the picture just list anything that pops into your head (so if you look at this picture and think "circus", write it down). Then take those words and put a couple of them together, to see what interesting imagery you can come up with. The great thing about this, is that you can do it for any picture or image that you have around. Then keep a list of all the imagery you come up with in a notebook and when you need some inspiration, you've got a list of imagery to get you started.








Example
my list of words and phrases
*circus
*lights
*hell
*fireworks
*night
*darkness
*going
*crowd
*blend
*melt
*never-ending
*silence
*routine
*foreign
*cruise control
*super human
*speed
*lost
*window
*stop
*non-stop


some of the imagery that I came up with: circus window, hell fireworks, melt darkness and routine silence

Field Trip!

Museums are an excellent source of inspiration, for me at least, and I've visited more art museums in the last few weeks than I've visited in my whole life. Over spring break, I visited the Wadsworth Atheneum and the Met. I went to see the Benton, to see the master of fine arts exhibition: Future Shock. Then two weekends ago the Visual Arts Club from Eastern put on a trip to NYC and we went to the Whitney and the MoMA. Art museums are a great source for inspiration, especially some of the more contemporary exhibits because you can't see those works in a book or online. My suggestion is to go to museums, because even the art that you've seen 100 times in books is every different when you see the actual work; seeing an 8 ft. painting in front of you is a very different experience than looking at a 2 in. picture in a book.

Hit the Books

One of my favorite places to find creative inspiration is in art books. I, personally, have three that are always at hand: The Art Book, The 20th Century Art Book and Art USA: The American Art Book. All three are put out by Phaidon Press, which publishes a nice selection of art reference books among other things. There are 500 pieces of art in each book, so it's pretty hard to go through all of them and not be inspired by something, whether that is the subject, the medium or simply a certain color used in an intriguing way. The Art Book is the first one I turn to simply because it has a nice mix of both classic art and more modern works.

Sweet Teeth

Right now Eastern has an exhibit in the Akus gallery called 'Sweet Tooth' with art by Yosiell Lorenzo. It's a really cool exhibit with some very intriguing art. Going into the gallery gave me a bunch of ideas for my own art. I also went to the artist's talk and heard about how he got started and where he gets his inspiration. I always think is interesting to know where other arists get inspiration because you may never think of something as inspiration until someone else mentions that it inspired them.

Dada

In one of my classes, we had to "write" a Dada poem. Here are the instructions to create a Dada poem (according to Tristan Tzara's method):

1. Take a newspaper and a pair of scissors
2. Choose an article the length you want your poem to be
3. Cut out the article
4. Carefully cut out each individual word and put them in a bag
5. Gently shake the bag
6. Take out word by word and copy down on paper, in the order they come out
7. The poem is finished when the bag is empty

Undoubtedly, if you follow this, you will end up with a lot of nonsense, but some of the phrases that come up, can give you some wonderful imagery ideas and I found it was a very good place to grab inspiration. Some of the phrases that I really liked from mine were 'testing dangerous judge of Justice' and 'handcuffs comment controlled control'.

I found that a plastic cup worked better than a bag. For mine, I used every time that a comma came up as a line break and every period as a stanza break. Also, you might want to either not include hyphenated words or write the whole word on one piece of paper, so that the poem makes a little more sense in the end and at least every word is a real word.

Inspiration

It seems that I'm always looking for inspiration for my art and when I really need it, I can't find anything to inspire me. So this is a place to collect different things for inspiration. Whether that is images, phrases, or assignments and activities, that bring ideas to mind. I'm compiling inspiration for visual art but that doesn't mean that what gets put on here couldn't be used for writing, theatre or any other art form. Anything can be inspiration, it all depends on how you see it!