Creative Inspiration

I never know when creative inspiration will appear. This week two different things collided and exploded into a storm of creative activity.

Creative Inspiration

First I checked out and read a wonderful book Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention. This large scale book features 100 images and a conversation between art writer Lawrence Weschler and photographer Abelardo Morell. Morell’s project began when he gave his wife a photograph of flowers for her birthday. That photograph began a journey into “one of the most familiar of artistic subjects, the flower, and through a series of optical and painterly interventions creates images that are at once beautiful to look at and subtly surreal.”

I was fascinated with how Morell described taking many photographs of different bouquets of flowers in the same vase and then combined the photographs in Photoshop to create his wonderful and varied images. (You can see more images from the book in this blog post from Lenscratch.)

An image from Flowers for Lisa

While I was enjoying Flowers for Lisa I noticed that the amaryllis buds on the two bulbs I bought in December were beginning to swell and open. I decided to photograph the buds as they matured and the flowers as they opened, taking several photographs each day to record how they changed and developed over time.

Once I began making the different photographs I wondered whether I could combine them using Photoshop to show how the flowers changed over time. While not using the same techniques as Morell, I was inspired by his boundless creativity to work on creating a series of amaryllis photographs that expressed how I feel about these beautiful flowers.

Today is my fifth day of photographing and playing with these images and I feel as if I have just begun to explore the possibilities. It’s so exciting when I feel so inspired by a subject and a series. I am unable to predict when the magic will happen but when it does, it’s wonderful!

Five things to spark creative inspiration:

1. Study art created by other artists. Read books about art. Visit galleries.
2. Pay attention to what you love (I happen to love flowers and they inspire me in many different ways).
3. Follow your curiosity.
4. Show up and do the work even when you don’t feel inspired. Some day, when you least expect it, inspiration will appear.
5. Don’t quit too soon.

“The essential ingredients for creativity remain exactly the same for everybody: courage, enchantment, permission, persistence, trust—and those elements are universally accessible. Which does not mean that creative living is always easy; it merely means that creative living is always possible.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear