Recently I found myself in a creative slump and I wondered just where my inspiration had gone. THe dictionary defines inspiration as the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative.
Thats how we all come to that inspiration is in life. During my art school years I came to think of sinspiration as smokey muse that lays always just at the periphery of my vision. An elusive mist that leads me on and on often never really materializing into what I expect it to be. Often I sit and complain that a creative slump has me uninspired. It's in those times that I have learned that inorder be creative, inorder to find my way I must put eye to viewfinder and begin the process regardless. With each push of the shutter the chase to find the muse of inspiration takes a step forward. I guess that inorder to be creative an artist must each day be busy in the persuit of it all. In to be inspired to create on must struggle with the task pushing ever forward, ever forward. I believe that Pablo Picasso said it best when he said: "Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working." In a nutsshell that really is the answer, the way to create. To be busy with the struggle of art is the very spark of inspiration. I have found it a hard lesson. One that requires me to do when I just really don't want to fight forward. Scripture says that we must push on towards the mark of the high calling of God. Art is just that a high calling. To create is to indeed be about the fathers work. I see photograpy as that spark that opens my eye to the very soul of the world that surronds me. I must see things as they really are and not as we've been told they appear. to dig deep to the vey esseence is the struggle of inspiration. To see in a new way and I guess nolonger look the that glass darkley. I have always loved to see things photographed and in that hopefully show not jsut what they are but to show also what else they are. To share those hidden things, to make an object nolonger ordinary is the passion, the inspiration. I desire to always be working so that inspiration can always find me, espcially when I'm lost in the high weeds of life.
I leave you with the words of the Great Muhammad Ali who floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee: "The man who has no imagination has no wings."
Find life in all that you do. Seek the deep things and never settle for the mundane or the ordinary. Life is too short and fragile to live without experiencing the very esscene of it.
From Studio317 I send you belssings for an extraordinary life full of creative moments and overflowing with inspiration. Now get busy!
-gary