I’m super excited this morning because I’ve had a tremendous moment of inspiration! Like lightning that has struck my brain.
I’m constantly trying to communicate the importance of daily art and creating space for inspiration may be the most important reason for daily art.
What we’re doing when we practice daily is your creating space and holding room for luck and inspiration to enter and change your life forever.
Alan Watts talks about how we are all different people every moment of every day. That may be true or not but I know that every moment there is a chance that our minds are changed and we are shook to the core and our life from then on is completely different. Think about some of the most pivotal moments in your life and you will find moments that acutely separate the person you were before and the person you are now.
This is what happens when we create the space for daily practice. Inspiration can change us and our lives forever.
Stephen King says the same thing. He works daily to prepare the way for his muse.
“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he’s on duty), but he’s got the inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and little wings got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life.”
Stephen King
Twyla Tharp says this:
“The more you are in the room working, experimenting, banging away at your objective, the more luck has a chance of biting you on the nose.
Woody Allen said that eighty percent of success in show business is showing up. It’s the same with luck: eighty percent of it is showing up to see it. My dancers can be doing the most marvelous things in the studio, but if I’m not there to witness it, it may as well be the proverbial tree falling in the forest. Never happened.
Twyla Tharp from The Creative Habit
We create the space for luck, inspiration and life changing situation by showing up, DAILY!
How can you show up today?
Regardless if your spending 5 minutes or 5 hours on your creative practice, create the space for inspiration to strike you like a bolt of lighting. Create room for your life to change, forever, in 5 minutes flat.
My lightning strike moment today happened when I was working on my Severus Snape drawing and I all of a sudden saw a confluence of my self-portrait drawing and my drawing of Black Panther coming together in a torrent of emotional swirls surrounding the stoic mask of Snape’s face.
The top left is going to have a dark mark and the right will have a doe Patronus and each will have countering swirls of motion, simulating emotion, irradiating from his head.
What makes Serverus Snap’s character so complex is the deep dark evil of his involvement with Voldemort and his deep love for Lilly Potter yet his inability to express those emotions. He is trained in the equivalent of magical espionage and to let his mask slip would mean death for others and breaking of his word.
These energies will be similar to my doppelganger of energy in my self-portrait and the composition should be striking with a diagonal cut through the paper, the top light and the bottom dark.
The center of this emotion, the eye of the storm, is the stoic mask of Snape. Almost closed completely shut from all emotion.
The normal 15 minute warm-up in graphite.
I love this exercise from the The Natural Way to Draw book. Well, at least I love what I’m doing with the 15 minute gestures exercise. I supposed to be doing 15 one minute gestures but I really wanted to do some extended gesture studies. Which is another exercise from the book.
I create space for inspiration and was rewarded with amazing insight!
Keep focus after being struck by lightning.
Calm tranquility! Try to be energized without the anxiety.
