It seems every artist is different in finding sources of inspiration or ideas that inform their work. It's such a personal experience and really is the basis for not only what we do but why we bother — what it is that drives us to make anything at all.
For me it often comes spontaneously in moments of contemplation or quiet. Occasionally if I'm in a relaxed or meditative state I'll suddenly get a flood of images. One of the most common points of inspiration for me is during the in between times of falling asleep or waking up.
Sometimes, though, it seems inspiration can come directly from a source of influence — and in this regard, when it rains it can really pour.
In New Zealand, long drives would often involve listening to Alan Watts. For anyone who might not be familiar with Mr. Watts, he was a philosopher who was incredibly good at translating Eastern thought for Western understanding, but without being academically stuffy or a taking on the role of a guru. He taught at a handful of universities where his teachings were often recorded, and in recent years his son has made some of Watts' talks available in podcast form, which are for sale at alanwatts.net. The site also offers the talks broken up into 15 minute segments as a free podcast.
I remember a particular drive home from Golden Bay, winding through lush green mountain roads and listening to the first part of Following The Middle Way, which you can listen to here (ignore the lame "video" element and just listen). Something about it struck the right cord with me that day, and those first 15 minutes inspired three eventual images. Mostly for my own curiosity, here are the pictures with the words that inspired them:
"To feel yourself as a separate ego, a source of action and awareness that is entirely separate and independent from the rest of the world, somehow locked up inside a bag of skin, is seen as a hallucination. That you are not a stranger in the earth that comes into this world either as a result of a natural fluke or being a sort of spirit that comes from somewhere else altogether, but that you in your fundamental existence, you are the total energy that constitutes this universe, playing that it's you. Playing that it's this particular organism, and even playing that it's this particular person. Because the fundamental game of the world is a game of hide and seek."
"The basis of life is spectrum. ... All sensation, all feeling, all experience whatsoever is moving through spectra. You don't only have the spectrum of color, you have the spectrum of sound, you have various complex spectra of texture, of smell, of taste and you're constantly operating through all the possible variations of experience. And it implies that you can't know one end of the spectrum without also knowing the other. ... And behind everything that we experience, all our various sensations of sound, of color, of shape, of touch, there's the white light. And I'm using the phrase 'the white light' rather symbolically, I don't mean it literally. But there is common to all sensations what you might call the basic sense. And if you explore back into your sensations and reduce them all to the basic sense, you're on your way to reality, to what underlies everything, to what is the ground of being, the basic energy. And to the extent that you realize this, and know that you ARE it, you transcend, you overcome, you surpass the illusion that you are simply John Doe, Mary Smith or what have you."
Again, all quotes are excerpts from Following The Middle Way, by Alan Watts.
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