Inspiration is not magic
I want to write about inspiration. The word comes up all the time in media articles and interviews and I want to examine what it means.
Cambridge English dictionary:
Inspiration: Someone or something that gives you ideas for doing something
So what is inspiration?
When I started writing this I thought I knew what this word means and what it means to me, now I am not so sure. The word inspiration in its current usage seems to me to be closely linked to the idea of magic. In this sense Inspiration means brain waves that come to you in dreams or a flash of amazing thought – Eureka moments where everything suddenly falls into place in your mind and the solution to whatever problem you are struggling with is suddenly revealed out of the blue.
Information gathering
I don’t think inspiration works quite like that, certainly not for me. I think there is a process going on in my brain, all the time, of information gathering. I look at the world and collect anything that interests me in my memory, my camera and my sketchbook. I think I filter things at several stages including this one, where I decide what to look at. I am doing this all day every day including when I watch TV and scroll social media. It’s as if I am collecting a body of visual data. This then is the raw material that I have to work with when I decide what I want to create next. I don’t just regurgitate it all, it has to sit and be considered and develop until it fits in somehow with my current agenda for making artworks.
Play and juxtaposition
It’s as if there is a fermentation procedure where ideas are sampled, mixed at random then blended into something that could be made, I think the word is to cogitate. Although I do this in my mind I also go through a sketching process where forms are played with and juxtaposed until something coherent emerges. And there is something somewhat magical about this – which I think is the wonder of the human brain. Our minds hold so much information and not just imagery and words there is also our feelings and our whole history and of course the whole unmapped area we know as the unconscious. While the conscious mind is all constantly changing incrementally as we input more and more experiences, the unconscious is a well of intelligence that we simply don’t have direct access to except through our dreams and occasional insights if we are lucky.
Presumably the unconscious is not constrained by logic or rationality or time or even our own bodies. It can roam wherever it wants and judging by our dreams it combines and assembles ideas that just would not work in our waking world because they would be rejected as absurd or just unacceptable.
Rich pickings
I think this resource is what we are trying to tap into when we seek creative ideas.
I think that you can probably make this happen but it’s something you have to only half control, you have to let it occur as much as contrive it, to let it flow and settle, let it be logical or not. You also have to let it fail and try again later so there is a kind of ‘relax, don’t force it’ state of mind in play, I am guessing we have to try and hold back our conscious control in order that there is space for the unconscious to seep in.
I say seep because I think the unconscious is not just clever and wondrous it’s also where we hold the full gamut of our most extreme fears and desires and the reason we can’t dwell much in there is that it knows no bounds and would happily let us act out all our worst capabilities, that’s why we have a conscious mind too, really so we can survive and not all kill each other whenever we feel a bit annoyed.
In order to try and use more of our mind we need to integrate the ways in which the unconscious can help us in imaginative research when we need new ideas. We need to make space to jumble or combine thoughts in new ways and synthesise unfiltered ideas to make images and stories that can be digested consciously and shared in the form of artworks of all sorts.
Roam around the mind
Goal orientation really does not fit well with this process, it has to be done in an open and benevolent space where the outcome is not specified, all that matters is the freedom to roam around the mind and see what emerges.
And yet there are goals. I am clearly trying to generate sculptural ideas and end up with something coherent enough to draw and then to make with clay. I have to keep any urge to control the outcome to one side while this process is playing itself out. Play is the operative word here, it’s like entering a room where your conscious control is not in charge, it’s just one of the elements that is working to generate, assess and combine ideas.
Artificial intelligence
As I write this I am noticing that what I describe has an awful lot in common with how you might program an AI to make a piece of artwork.
I can’t necessarily claim that my analogue or organic process of generating ideas is superior to using an AI in the sense of the results and certainly not in terms of speed. Can AI do cogitation? I am sure it could imitate it in some convoluted way. But AI could only try to imitate the influence of the unconscious presumably by taking previous examples of the absurd and surreal into its massive library of possibilities.
The process that I am trying to describe is a subjective procedure and it’s very human in every sense and like most human things it’s complicated and hard to understand. This also means it’s rich with layers of meaning, layers of experience and the time it takes to unfold means it gathers energy and substance as the imaginative work and making takes place.
Discovering meanings
I sometimes find that meanings in my work come to light after I have realised them in clay, fired them and glazed them or indeed at any of those stages, not everything is planned and intentional in this flow of ideas from notions in my head, to drawings on paper, to forms made in three dimensions.
All your experience
My understanding of inspiration is that it is a complex and diffused sequence of relaxed hard work, trials, errors and revisions that generates good ideas. Sometimes this also involves waiting for everything to fall into the right place so that you might think your inner genius just popped up out of nowhere. In fact I think it’s a collaboration between all the strata in your mind and your body. Those Eureka moments are the end result of a really complex nurturing of many strands of perception which is informed by memories, dreams, your whole anatomy and all the experiences in your whole life.
Did you know – about my drawing stream?
Every Monday morning I join hundreds of other artists for Drawing is Free. It’s a Zoom group run from Paris by english artist Chloe Briggs. The group lasts for one hour during which which we all draw one of the participants for the duration of a song played through a streaming service. Each song only last a few minutes so you have to work fast. Then another model is chosen and it all goes round again. We usually get through 12 -15 drawings so it is very productive and a great way to start the week.
- You can see my drawings on my Instagram drawing stream.
- If you want to join in go to the Drawingisfree webpage.
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This article is based on one published at the end of January 2026 in my email newsletter The Glimmerists. If you subscribe you get the article before the version is published here on the website. There is more in the newsletter too including a feature artwork piece in each issue with insights about how artworks are made and how the ideas behind them evolve.
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