There is a word commonly used to describe inspiration when it is brought on by the presence of a particular person. And that word is Muse.

A reference I found states:

(The actual word might stem from the Proto-Indo-European root *men- "think"[2]) In Greek mythology, the Muses are a sisterhood of goddesses or spirits, their number set at nine by Classical times, who embody the arts and inspire the creation process with their graces through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music, and dance.

If someone called you a muse this means that you were the inspiration for the making of an artistic expression in any medium including the visual, musical and literary arts.

Some people think that this only means ‘the body’ as might be represented in a painting of ‘the nude’. The concept of the muse encompasses the spirit, face, voice, thoughts, expression etc and yes even the body. This is because we see the body as the carrier of all human attributes.

As far as I’m concerned a muse is simply the inspirational moments that generate creativity. The muse is of course recognized in the human form but I suggest it can be anything and anywhere.

Who was John Lennon’s muse..... Yoko ONO

Who was Charles Shultze’s muse.... a little dog called snoopy

As a practising artist as well as the fund development and communications officer at Two Rivers Gallery – people often ask where do I get my ideas from?

Artists over the generations have different inspirational moments. Some might say their inspiration is the beauty of nature, or the majesty of the mountains, or the treachery of the sea. Or even the tenacity of an ant.

For me I am inspired by my everyday life. By the things around me. By the people I love and even the things they say. For instance the last major exhibition I had started off after a comment made by a friend in a pub the UK. After terrible service by the bartender I complained to my friend and he said ‘oh darling haven’t you noticed that when one gets older one becomes invisible’ .

And that was the beginning of me looking at the concept of invisibility. I experimented with photographs and drawings in and on glass, worked with thousands of glass beads as well as giving glass blowing a go. I worked with this concept for three years and it was done, or the comment was abated, after I installed the work at the Study Gallery in Poole England in 2003.   Check out this link and see the work http://www.thestudygallery.org/archive/other/03/6.html .

Inspiration is everywhere and it is every-day. It is always different for everybody.

Last week I talked a little bit more about where abstract art came from. I sited the advent of the Camera and the concept of souvenirs being brought back to Europe by Adventurers to distant continents over 100 years or more ago.  Today I’m going to talk about the influence of Japanese Painting on the Modern Era of painting.

Japanese Paintings were totally different than European Painting. The picture plane was flat - in other words it did not incorporate the illusion, and rules, of perspective that European painters had been working with since the first representation of perspective by Italian artist Brunelleschi in about 1415. And the flat or high colour palette used in Japan was considered quite bizarre compared to colour theory and the mixing of paint being used in Europe at that time.

Specifically I refer to Van Gogh’s painting Room at Arles of 1889. It was painted with high, or bright, colour and with broken rules ofnperspective. The perspective, or picture plane, is tipped forward so far that it looks like the bed could slide forward out of the painting. Part of the reasoning behind this might’ve been so that the viewer could see the entire bedroom with all its contents, rather than the traditional painting of the illusion of a room (illusion meaning that your eye is tricked into thinking that it is looking at a painting of the bedroom as you might recognize it in real life).

So the advent of Abstract Painting and the Modern Era of Art was about artists being influenced by the Camera and the NEW world cultural references.

A few weeks ago I talked about ‘why artists make paintings that are unrecognizeable’. I put the oweness, in part, to the invention of the camera in the 19th century and that artists started to question whether their skills were needed to paint or record the world around them now that the camera could do the job just as well.

There was another major aspect in the modern world that shifted the way artists were thinking.  The world was opening up and it was becoming fashionable to collect curiosities from cultures that were previously unknown to the public. Adventurers were bringing back souvenirs from their travels – these included South American, Asian, African and First Nations traditional objects, poles & masks. These objects represented spiritualism in deities that were completely different from the religious icons that Europeans were familiar with. These objects of curiosity were highlighted across Europe in wealthy homes, museums and were even sold in ‘curiosity shops’. They were popping up everywhere so much so that a Surrealist artist called André Breton had a Kwakwaka’wakw mask in his collection from Alert Bay.

 
Put yourself in the Christian based European culture of 100 years ago ... How would you have reacted to masks from a totally different, and alien, culture. Would you have been a little curious or maybe even a little frightened. Artists employ their emotional , intellectual and practical skills in order to come to terms with the new, the curious and even the frightful.