How/where do you draw inspiration?

[bjorke]

I go to church. Them peoples is wacky.

[Svend Videbak]

Whenever I'm bored and fed up with picture-making, I take a break. If the break goes on longer than I'm comfortable with, I relax and start looking through my favourite books of drawings. Whenever I come to that tiny brown ink drawing by Rembrandt, made with a bamboo pen (probably), of the farmhouse in snow with a fence coming into the foreground with the purest calligraphic beauty imaginable, I feel a flush of pleasure and excitement and inspiration flows to me from everywhere.

[keithwms]

Regarding music as an influence, I can say a bit more.

The music that I found most "visually' interesting was composed by Alexander Scriabin, who is also thought to have been possibly afflicted (or blessed?) with visual/auditory synesthesia. Scriabin associated certain chords or even individual notes with certain colours. He believed that it was possible to combine all the senses into one sublime experience, in other words, he didn't see any need for a clear separation between them. I often look (pun intended) to his music or that of D. Shostakovich for visual inspiration. There are some pieces from both of them that strike me as extremely visual. Some of the work from DS is painfully visual for me, I can't stand it for that reason, it's just so dark and gloomy. Scriabin tends more often to evoke flight and unusual light, for me at least.

Funny, Albert Schweitzer pushed the theory that the music of J.S. Bach is visual- I certainly don't see it as such even though I dabble in it and have tried to "see" it. The intricate and interwoven pervasive fugue structure makes me more attuned to timing and dynamics, but not colour per se. Bach's successor (in many ways other than geographical), F. Mendelssohn, composed some of what I think is the most strongly visual semiromantic music. I find it impossible to listen to, for example, the Hebrides overture without getting a very vivid landscape in my head, and I don't think it's merely because pieces like that are often playing in the background when we see dramatic landscape on TV or the silver screen! I think that style of composiiton is as inherently visual as the impressionistic genre (Debussy et al). Mendelssohn composed a literally description of something he saw, he was just a tiny bit more shackled to convention than Chopin and later Scriabin.

Scriabin would interest anyone who wants to know how wonderfully chromatic "classical" music can be- it may well give you visual thoughts. Listen to, for example, Vers la flamme, which of course evokes a crackling flame and which (I think) somehow engages the sense of touch as well, when performed by someone with complete mastery e.g. Horowitz:

ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_FKKIC1oSw

Another very strongly visual piece, for me, is the trio op.67 of Shostakovich, now that is one glorious organic meal consumed in four courses; not surprisingly, I had it strongly in my head whilst looking at the microworld of bugs and lichen and moss and minerals around Mono lake a few weeks ago. It is just crawling with unfamiliar life, but has a strong undercurrent of Jewish folk rhythms, perhaps.

I just find it very hard to listen to this kind of music and not get visual ideas that inspire me to want to look for particular compositions, and conversely, when out shooting these things just pop into my head, quite audibly. I think the photographs that are most satisfying to me are the ones that I associate with a particular musical influence.


And no, I don't use and never have used any psychoactive substances

[telkwa]

I (like many people here), have way too much equipment, and often carry too many prime lenses around. I grabbed a lens I hadn't used in almost a year (20mm Ultra-Wide for 35mm camera) and shot a roll with it at my favourite place to take pictures (fishing boat docks at the harbour). It forced me to come up with new ideas on how to make a pleasing picture with an unusual lens. When I developed it - I was pleased with several shots.

[davetravis]

Hi Derrick, long time no ear!
I'm to the point now where all I think about is how the final print will look. Realism, surrealism, abstract, fantasy,
AA or Van Gogh?
The actual subject matter is becoming secondary to the final impression I'm trying to make in the print.
This ain't always easy, because nature is mostly natural!
BTW, I'll be at the Longmont fairgrounds the weekend before T-day. Stop by and say hi!
DT

[Black Dog]

Originally Posted by n_mercenier

The music of Nick Drake makes me want to make photographs of the autumn.
Miles Davis makes me want to photograph the night, and Dead Can Dance makes me want to photograph dark or mist atmospheres.
...

Me too-love all the above and Brian Eno's ambient stuff has really inspired some of my more minimal landscapes. Also even as a confirmed MF/LF user, I've decided to always carry a 35mm in my pocket just as a kind of photographic sketchbook [some of these images will probably surface in the postcard exchange at some point].

[Derek Lofgreen]

Dave,
Will do. It was great to see you last year. I look forward to hanging around your booth again. See you then.

D.

[schroeg]

Oddly enough - the news. My work deals with entropy and the horrendous state of the world energy situation today. Sift through the nonsense and there is plenty of inspiration in there ;-)

[salamandrine]

I really don't know what to answer.....
everything, I guess... everything new to my eyes... everything i enjoy watching. something old but a glimpse that caught my eye...

this year i have photographed the streets, music shows, theatre, popular marches, landscapes, animals, kids... whatever makes me smile when i look at it without the camera. whatever makes me feel good or gives me the urge to press the trigger. it can be anywhere, anytime. sometimes i'm just laying around the house and suddenly something pops up on my mind that I would like to photograph. If I can, out I go

i can mix music and reading, but I haven't managed to mix music and photography. to me it's a mixed experience - I need to be hearing the surroundings, the sounds of what I am photographing. And that doesn't exist with music in my head.

[Fugazi Dave]

Finding inspiration, I find, is largely a matter of paying attention to your own responses. If something seems to resonate with you at a given time, look into it. Don't try to force it. Looking for inspiration in something that doesn't excite you is like rooting around for a diamond in a big pile of cow sh*t. IOW, you're not going to find it.

If you pay attention to what you innately respond to, though, that's a good way to get clued in to what is really going to get you going if you don't already know what inspires you already. Even if you do, this sort of mindfulness is still a very valuable exercise as we all change over time and what inspires us today may seem dull and lifeless tomorrow. Pay attention long enough and you begin to be able to make connections between the things you like and this points you toward yet more potential inspiration. We collect these little points of reference over time, and eventually little clusters and connections yield a greater, emergent meaning that can tell us a lot more about what we love, why, and likewise similar things about ourselves. It's a road map to arriving at a gestalt of inspiration unique to our own experience.

For me, it comes from all sorts of things. In non-photographic art it's people like Caravaggio, Titian, Raphael, Rodin, Picasso, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and Lee Bontecou. In photography I look to people like Herb Ritts, Jock Sturges, Mark Seliger, Mark Laita, Phil Marco, Art Kane, Bert Stern, Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe, Daido Moriyama, and Shomei Tomatsu. In literature it's Vladimir Nabokov, Osamu Dazai, Jeff Noon, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, John Shirley, Kafka, and Allen Ginsberg. In philosophy/spirituality/intellect there's Kant, Nietzsche, John Daido Loori, Thich Nhat Han [sic], Robert Pirsig, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. The list could go on for dozens of pages. Most of these are things that I've arrived at through the process of paying attention to my own inner responses, which are sometimes very subtle and easily missed.

What I'm getting at is this: the key to finding inspiration is already in you. It's just a matter of paying attention and following the clues that are left you.