“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration.

Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.

If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you.

If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction.

Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”

– Chuck Close

// My favourite artist-as-professor taught us that it didn’t matter if it took two minutes to create something, or two years, recognizing when you’re done, at that particular point in time, is what’s important. A piece is no more valid, or ‘better’, with more time. There is no such bullshit as ‘sunk cost’ with art. 

It has always been a juggle: outdoor adrenaline activities vs. the indoor creation flow. They’re both about the purity of doing. One creates visible artifacts, the other one, well, you, are the artifact.

Now that scarcity of personal ‘free’ time continues to stretch like pink Double Bubble in a complex cat’s cradle… it’s crucial that there is no hesitation or setup time needed.  The same way that the music workstation was ready to go as soon as your bum hit the studio chair, the camera must be within a hand’s reach away. Or the iPhone is a swipe away from transforming into palette, pshop, polaroid and publisher.  Instagram is as much of a gallery as four white walls. “Studio Time” is whenever, wherever. That, perhaps, is the true gift of technology. It’s not about saving time, it’s the elasticity of time, as needed. Well, that and the maturity of ‘just working’, always improving.

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