The Seed of Inspiration
Whenever I see, hear, or read something I really like it is as though it plants a small seed in my chest. That seed starts as something like adoration, an admiration of the beautiful thing I have just taken in. It starts to slowly grow the more I connect with it, the more I think about what it is, why I like it so much. The seedling grows and grows until all I want to do is what the person who has made this beautiful thing has done. That seedling, the feeling it represents, I think, is inspiration.
As a child I would fall deeply into periods of admiration and inspiration. As Picasso had his blue period, 8-year-old me had her Egyptology period and spent the summer holiday reading and writing notes from every book on Egypt that I could find in my local library until I knew the hieroglyphic alphabet off by heart. This dedicated passion I had stretched far and wide; from spending hours sat gazing up at ‘Dante’s Dream’ by Rossetti in the Walker Art Gallery, to handwriting visual transcriptions of documentaries about penguins, to doing colourful makeup every weekend after watching American beauty gurus on YouTube. In a nutshell, I often find myself in admiration of the work of others and want to immerse myself in it completely.
As I’ve gotten older, while I may no longer set out on mammoth summer holiday obsessions, I still find myself overwhelmed with admiration, and a following inspiration, many times a day. This is evidenced most clearly in my ‘inspo’ highlights on my Instagram page. Scrolling through the feed of my art account is like being a magpie digging through a giant pile of shiny, shiny treasure. Imagine me, eyes glistening and glued to my phone, swiping, and smiling, and quickly adding each image to my story to be saved to my inspo folders, tucking the beloved treasures into a pocket to keep for later.
These inspirations are integral to my work as an artist. Something that has been helpful is identifying why these pieces of work plant that inspiration seed for me; what are the common themes? What do they make me feel? How can I embody this feeling in my work? Every day I collect lots of images, poems, paintings and drawings on Instagram and each of them plays a role in the drawings I make. Phillip Guston refers to this form of inspiration as “studio ghosts”. He says “When you're in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics... and one by one if you're really painting, they walk out. And if you're really painting YOU walk out. “. This is true of my creative process. When I’m drawing; be it an illustration or a Fine Art drawing I start with all these images I’ve collected up and saved in my folders. The qualities that draw me to them such as softness, intimacy, romanticism, honesty, quietness are all present as I work. Until, by the end of the drawing, I am left with a new piece of work, a feeling that is my own, born of the feelings of all the other pieces of work that inspired me.
As well as pieces of work I have admired, writing practices are also incredibly influential in my drawing practices. In my fine art practice, the writing and drawing practices are entirely entwined, symbiotic in nature. The mark making practice allows for me to process, allows things to come to the surface, functions as therapy; this then allows for me to write. The writing functions as the therapy after therapy in which I reflect on the various things that have arisen further articulating and processing them. In this way, both of my creative practices inspire and feed into each other, providing the fuel and new perspectives to continue making magic!
Writing, of course, is also an integral part of my illustration practice as it is so often the starting point. I think of illustration as a visual translation of writing, and so while my personal experiences and creative tendencies help create the drawing, it is the writing the guides me in the making process. I think, as an illustrator, it is near impossible to have artists block when there are so many incredibly visual pieces of writing calling out to be drawn! This is something that made my collaboration with Emily McChrystal on her book ‘Soul Notes Poetry’ so natural! I am an avid fan of Emily’s work, and there were so many of her poems which had already unravelled themselves into beautiful imagery in my head when reading them, so it was almost a relief to be able to realise those images in my illustrations!
My advice to someone feeling stuck in their creative journey would always be to go and immerse yourself in the things you love! Inspiration and influence can be found everywhere, go and spend time with those things that plant a seed in you and let it grow until you are desperate to get making yourself! Lots and lots of creating is sure to follow.