Art Beat: Finding inspiration

Every artist needs inspiration. When being creative is how you make a living or something that’s important enough to dictate how you spend your free time, calling on your inner muse can be challenging sometimes. We seldom have time to wait for inspiration to come, so it’s our job to inspire ourselves wherever we can, remaining open to the infinite possibilities while staying grounded in what we’re trying to achieve.

I hand-selected the following quotes to help stir up some inspiration for you local creative types. I hope that at least one of them resonates with you and gives you a fresh perspective on whatever you’re working on. At the very least, I hope you can get a chuckle or two out of these.

“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get the work done. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you’re not going to make an awful lot of work.”

- Chuck Close

“Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.”

- Anselm Kiefer

“All my inspiration comes from life. That’s how it never stops, in a way.”

- Marina Abramovic

“Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.”

- Johannes Brahms

“The torpid artist seeks inspiration at any cost, by virtue or by vice, by friend or by fiend, by prayer or by wine.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don’t get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.”

- Jack London