“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
These words have resonated with me for years. As an artist I work daily. Fortunately my creative process is multifaceted so I have lots of options when it comes to what to do. Both to my benifit and frustration I often challenge myself to complete amounts of work just at the edges of what feels comfortably managable. The most recent of these was 100 8x10 monotypes in a week. Not just any week, but a week in my already insanely busy life. Interested in developing a new process I had been tinkering with I used this challenge toforce me to grow and to master the nuance of this new method. I succeeded!
24 of 102 monotypes created in my challange
Having succesfully taken a leap in understanding this process I am now ready to make it bigger. Thus far everything has been 8x10 or smaller. Research is underway to combat size limitations. I love a good challange!