The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.
–Chuck Close, artist
Everything Matters 
I think you’ll really like it too.
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ah! it is on netflix and based on my ratings (of which I’ve done over a thousand) netflix predicts I will love the movie!!
can’t wait!
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mmm…thanks Susan for that tip…I’ll see if I can find the documentary on netflix…
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I find that this is true. I often start something becuase my motto is a rolling stone gathers no moss. What I mean by that is that once I get going I eventually have something to show for it at the end. If I never start, I don’t have anything. Many time is the only way I get anything done, and my end result may look nothing like the first day.
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Gianna,
That’s a great quote. My husband and I have seen a great documentary on Chuck Close, which is quite inspiring. We were always fans of his work, but he had this terrible spinal artery collapse in 1988, which caused him to be semi-paralyzed, and yet he still paints. Talk about a survivor!
Susan
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i love this and it’s very true.
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