Inspiration and motivation are two very curious and frustrating aspects of art making. You can be completely inspired to paint but have no motivation to actually sit down to do the work. Today, I spent the afternoon viewing the works of many great masters of art. As I walked from gallery to gallery within the Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, Spain, I was in complete awe of the level of craftsmanship. I kept thinking to myself that the museums of America have nothing on the museums of Europe. I quickly checked myself afterwards because the reality is that I don’t know that for an absolute fact. I’ve been to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The De Young Museum of Art, The Legion of Honor along with a few other smaller museums. But that certainty doesn’t cover the whole of America. Perhaps I should give America the benefit of the doubt. Still though, it’s hard not to be impressed by the work.
By the time I left, I was dreaming of art I wanted to make and of techniques that I wanted to try. I was inspired and yet at the same time not as motivated. I wondered why that was. Was it because the task seemed too great, the scale of my ambition was too large, I didn’t know what to say, or I wasn’t in the right studio space? Was it all of the above? Or simply was it because I was in analysis paralysis? Was I overwhelmed by my own artistic greed?
Making artwork on demand is very often one of the hardest things to do. It’s especially hard if you don’t have a framework for what to do or if the work you have to do isn’t something you love, let alone like. Many artists place a lot of pressure on themselves to make great work from the outset. We place undue pressure on ourselves to have the work have meaning beyond what we would normally want it to have.
After having spoken to a few artists on the subject of motivation and meaning, it’s my opinion that your work doesn’t have to have any more meaning than you want it to have. If you want to make a still life of oranges because you found the colors of the oranges against the greens of its leaves appealing, then by all means do so. You don’t need to worry about whether or not it makes a statement or if it’s a composition that’s already been made by someone else. Its beauty should be expressed because you wanted to celebrate it. If you think about it, it’s probably the most genuine and honest work you’ll probably make.
There’s a really great scene in the movie Hemingway & Gellhorn wherein Gellhorn, who is struggling to write, asks Hemingway how he manages to write habitually? To which Hemingway, annoyed with being interrupted, retorts [ “ … a writer writes …” ].
The moment you stop thinking and start making is the start of you letting go of all the mental baggage you’ve been carrying around. So, “Free your mind and your ass will follow…”
