This is my desk. You've seen it before, here, when I talked about the inspiration wall I had going last year. It's easily the most personal space I have in our home. It is where I do all my writing for work and for True North (I'm sitting here right now, as a matter of fact), where I set up my paints and water when I paint at the easel, where I scribble in all my little notebooks, listen to whatever music I want, and plan and dream and get to be entirely myself - no one's mother or wife or friend, just me.
I loved the pictures and cut-outs on the last incarnation of the wall so much that I kept them up for a long time... long enough to get stale. When that happened, I started to let things pile up on my desk, brought the laptop out into the living room, and generally just ignored the office. I needed a little motivation to get back in there and freshen it up, but let's just say I wasn't feeling particularly... inspired.
Then in October --remember, I mentioned this?-- I started taking Lisa Congdon and Mati McDonough's five-week online painting class, Get Your Paint On. (Which was fantastic, by the way. I very much recommend any of their online classes.) The first week of the course, they told us NOT TO PAINT. I love them for this. The class really made me pace myself, right from the beginning. Instead, our assignment that week was to consciously start finding and documenting inspiration: filling blank books with clippings and photos, using a bookmarking site like pinterest, putting up inspiration walls, etc. Mati and Lisa's instruction was to begin filling up a well of inspiring visuals for you to use later. To use. This was so important.
Last year's inspiration wall was beautiful to me. I loved looking at it. But I didn't DO anything with it. I've been thinking a lot this year about how it's so easy for me to be lazy about "being inspired." Many of us do this, don't we? We fetishize inspiration; we let inspiration itself be the end goal. Last spring, I followed along as a great online conversation evolved on this topic: first Good Morning Inspiration, then Inspiration Fetishism, then the fabulous Blair with Curate or Create?. If you have time, do read these links, they're some seriously nutritious food for thought. (And the comments are good, too.) In this digital age we're in, it seems like the ease of sharing inspiration should be a good thing for creative people, but instead, it can be a hazard. There's this great Ira Glass quote that was making the rounds on facebook a few months ago:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
So, ok, there's a lot we could talk about in that quote. It's pretty excellent stuff. But besides how inspiring it is in helping you get over yourself and keep plugging away at your work, one of the things I just love is this distinction he makes between your taste and your art. Exhibiting your taste level is not a substitute for making your art. Curating a collection of things you like is not the same as creating a piece of your own. Similarly, it's so easy to troll around the internet forever just gorging yourself on all the pretty pictures and everybody else's creative process. But that's not a substitute either for creating something yourself.
The Get Your Paint On assignment butted up against all this in my head. I wanted to switch up the wall and start using that space again, but didn't want to just decorate. This isn't, after all, my middle school bedroom, with 90210 posters hung up with tape. This had to be a giant mood board that I would actually utilize. Mati and Lisa were not asking, "What do you think is pretty" but "What specifically is inspiring you right now?" And I wasn't sure what the answer was.
So I just figured I'd have to let my eyes decide. I sat down to collect images for the latest wall all in one go, without any themes in mind. I grabbed the magazines and catalogues I keep around for collaging with the kids and tore through them, literally, tearing out anything that called to me, all impulse, no thought. Then I rampaged through the "inspiration drawer" in my desk, in which I periodically throw things I like, and then I dug out a few overstuffed envelopes of collected art postcards and little keepsakes that I like to fill and then squirrel away in random closets. As opposed to last year's wall, which I added to a little bit at a time as the mood struck, this was much more of an image feast. Afterwards, I looked at what I had and saw some big themes and colorways organizing themselves through the pictures:
Color. Exuberance! Exuberant color. Within this grouping, there's also a lot about pattern, feathers, and, for some reason, parenthood. Who knows why. I love it.
(I dig these side by side. We have one of those rotator painting machines, and my girls can get in a mood and churn out 50 in one sitting. Some of them I keep for myself because they're just so happy and beautiful.)
(photograph of part of my favorite mural in the world, on The Women's Building in San Francisco. Half the time I lived in SF, I lived right across the street from this - in fact, this was the view from my window. What I would give to see it on a daily basis now...)
Pomegranates. And a general vibe of antique, formal still lifes with a riotous twist - been thinking a lot lately about the Dutch Baroque still lifes from the 16th/17th centuries (like this one), with their fruits split open and their flowers crawling with beetles.
The woods - particularly a lush, humid summer forest with an abundance of leaves. Love the idea of greenery growing so rampant that you only get glimpses of what's behind it.
And then, something harder to define. Something that is the opposite of all the wild fecundity above. A feeling of containment and mystery, of secrets kept.
(drawing to the left I did eight years ago when I was pregnant with Stella. It was a stained glass-inspired precursor to this journal cover.)
(bottom is one of my Maeve's paintings)
Similarly to last year's inspiration wall, one of the main benefits of having all these lovely images up in my workspace is simply that I walk into the room and feel immediately happy. The wall is a place for my eyes and mind to rest when I'm trying to think through an idea or figure out how to articulate something. But this wall is also a brand new and completely different entity for me. I have actually been inspired by this wall, as in: I've been making work, the idea for which has come to me because of the pictures I've hung here. Instead of feeling overwhelmed when I try to organize my creative plans, I feel more focused; I know what ideas I want to work on right now. How can I forget them? They're right there, writ large on my wall. I'm almost finished with a close-up still life of a split-open pomegranate, which I'll share when I'm done, and I've started sketches for a large self-portrait based on the Frida Kahlo postcard. I have pages of sketchbook ideas filled with more nascent ideas for paintings, and almost all of it is sourced from the wall one way or another - subject matter, color scheme, or mood. This is the best thing I could have possibly done for my creative process. I am truly being inspired.
