Where Do You Get Your Inspiration?, 2014.

Question from Year 5 pupils.

"Where do you get your inspiration?" 

Ah - where did you get your inspiration - the most frequently asked question of all - I suppose it suggests that people can't work out how you arrived at such a thing - like writing a song  - which is a mystery to me - but not to a musician I suppose.

One work leads to another - I have been drawing the world around me and putting those drawings together since I was 11 - it's a case of one thing leading to the next - I must have drawn hundreds of landscapes. When a view or landscape jumps out at me or answers the questions and thoughts I have in my head  - I draw it - or photograph it and then draw it.

This landscape looked flat and simple and like a picture and yet infinitely deep. I felt I COULD draw it.

It also has a sound track - some moody atmosphere music I commissioned from a musician friend. I wanted to create a mood and make sure that you knew that a mood was being created - that it was false but somehow felt real all the same - like some spaces in computer games can feel.

Look at Tomb Raider
Look at Jacob van Ruisdael
Look at James Whistler
Look at Claude Monet

I like it when the world looks abstract - when it looks like art - when the land divides itself up into strips.

 

January 31, 2014