Inspiration in Art

I’d like to talk to you about inspiration. If I had to quantify the questions I’m asked about my work the first would be, “What is scratchboard?” closely followed by, “How long did it take you to do that?!” and third, “Where do you get your ideas?” Now, you might be thinking, “You’re a wildlife artist, isn’t it obvious where you get your ideas?” And yes, sometime my inspiration is pretty obvious, I simply open my eyes and start drawing. But a lot of the time images and ideas have to percolate through my brain before I know how I want to work on a particular piece.

Take my recent scratchboard of a grey wolf as an example. It all started with a photograph I took of Mack last fall:

But this image sat in my reference photo file for almost a year until I came across the second part of the inspiration. You know I enjoy reading Maggie Stiefvater’s blog, but I’m also enjoying reading her published writing, too, for example, Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception. So I read, with interest, the publisher’s blurb for her newest offering, Shiver (will be published by Scholastic, Fall 2009 – I can hardly wait, I loved her first book, LAMENT!) http://m-stiefvater.livejournal.com/tag/shiver

And Pow! I had a new idea:

Shiver: Grey Wolf. Scratchboard, 20 x 16 in. Copyright Tania Nault, 2008.

This percolation concept for how artists receive their inspiration isn’t limited to visual artists. Writers, for example, frequently combine unrelated ideas to create something new. In Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memior of the Craft King recounts the flash of inspiration that resulted in Carrie:

Whole he was going to college my brother Dave worked summers as a janitor at Brunswick High, his old alma mater. For part of one summer I worked there, too….
I got paired with a guy named Harry….
One day he and I were supposed to scrub the rust-stains off the walls in the girls’ shower. I looked around the room with the interest of a Muslim youth who for some reason finds himself deep within the women’s quarters. It was the same as the boys’ locker room, and yet completely different. There were no urinals, of course…. I also noticed that the showers, unlike those in the boy’s locker rooms had chrome U-rings with pink plastic curtains attached. You could actually shower in privacy….
This memory came back to me one day while I was working at the laundry, and I started seeing the opening scenes of a story: girls showering in a locker room where there were no U-rings, pink plastic curtains, or privacy. And this one girl starts to have her period. Only she doesn’t know what it is, and the other girls–grossed out, horrified, amused–start pelting her with sanitary napkins… she reacts… fights back… but how?
I’d read an article in Life magazine some years before, suggesting that at least some reported poltergrist activity might actually be telekinetic phenomena… There was some evidence to suggest that young peoplemight have such powere, the article said, especially girls in early adolescence, right around the time of their first–
Pow! Two unrelated ideas, adolescent cruelty and telekinesis, came together, and I had an idea.

And there you have it: inspiration.