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.