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Dispatches from the Studio: An Artist Blog

Struggling to feel inspired? Here's my process.

September 12, 2023

Struggling to feel inspired? Here's my process.

Summer’s over. The boys are back in school.

Close-up photograph of rosehips with a cream box and the text, "I had a crisis of inspiration—but it all turned out okay. A new painting series is in the works!"

I had this grand plan to create my next bunch of paintings filled with golden fields of wheat and ensuing straw bales, but they all bailed (ha) mid-August.

I had an internal crisis for about a week trying to decide whether I should paint it anyway, but it didn’t feel quite right.

My whole process is about creating from what’s around me. This place; this time: Southwestern France. The Dordogne countryside. Late summer; almost autumn. It’s crazy how when you get up close, the seasons change so quickly and so constantly.

It’s almost an absurdity to make a painting series about any one period of time because everything is shifting so quickly. Blackberry season is down to the last hangers-on. Plum season is rotting on the ground and getting devoured by hornets. Fig season is well under way but surely just as momentary.

Two photos on a cream background: close up of red and purple blackberries growing wild on the vine; close up of an orange and gray butterfly landed on a lavender wildflower in a field.

Where the field were full of wild carrot buds what seems like yesterday, they’re now full of crackly beige stems and seeds. The wildflowers are just hanging on, and it’s probably the height of butterfly season, but, man, it’s dry out there.

Roses have turned to rosehips; the apples are starting to ripen. Acorns and hazelnuts are appearing bright green and working their way toward shades of gold and brown.

And this, this in fact is the work.

Not brainstorming or inventing ideas.

But rather just opening my eyes and looking at what’s around.

There is a surprising abundance of squiggles right about now—loose jangles of grass leaf and spiral-shaped mystery seeds. Gotta identify those.

The same way the mind identifies the recurrence of red-orange on the rosehips and apples and that one kind of butterfly. The way you notice the terra cotta of dried oak leaves mirroring the terra cotta of a freshly-tilled field.

I could go on and on describing it all, but somehow the beauty isn’t just in the image or even the recounting of it.

It’s in the feeling. The experience.

Close-cropped shot of someone kneeling in a field of grass with a sketchbook on her knees. A leather briefcase and a case of colored pencils are visible at the edge of the frame.

The delight of looking that yields a dawning awareness.

All this change. All this brilliant, vibrant detail that is life. This movement is happening around us and also in us.

We’re part of it. Not separate and not the same either.

And this. This is the story to tell.

I think it’s the same story I’m discovering and expressing every time I put brush to canvas.

And it’s worth telling again and again because it shows up in so many different ways, with so many different faces, in so many different moments.

Each of us is a living, walking, breathing incarnation of change.

There’s beauty in that.
Freedom too, I think. If we can just get used to the idea.

So that’s a story worth telling.
Let’s make a painting about that.

There we go. I found it; what I was looking for. Inspiration.

Which isn’t invention or serendipity or an unexpected gift—though it can be those things too.

But at its heart, inspiration is delighting in what’s around us.
Taking an interest in what this life is about.

Are you in?
Because this is just the beginning.

Two vertical photos on a cream background: a diagonal shot of a female artist smiling at the camera in front of a field of wild grass and an oak tree; close-up of a cluster of yellowing oak leaves on a green leaf background.

 



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