Looking For Inspiration

This post gives thanks to Hibiki Miyazaki who is a fellow artist I came upon through Flickr a few years back.  Her image Women With Yarn became the inspiration for my painting shown here of daughters Rose and Pearl. I believe it helps an artist to keep looking at the work of other artists they admire. I think of it as a sort of conversation, a passing back and forth of ideas and inspiration.

In my Noah Webster 1828 dictionary it tells me inspiration is  "the act of breathing into anything... the infusion of ideas into the mind by the Holy Spirit; the conveying into the minds of men, ideas, notices or monitions by extraordinary or supernatural influence".  When I look at work that I love it makes me want to go into the studio and begin working again.  It is as if I have breathed in and I need to exhale.

(The eastlake love seat my girls are sitting on was purchased from a local junk store with a matching rocker for $150 two years ago. The springs are all shot and need to be redone but I have not gotten around to fixing it yet. Rose and Pearl shared a bedroom for the last two years until Rose moved out at the end of last September.)

Our Families Are Like Old Quilts That Went Through The Washer Too Many Times

This is the main drawing for the Girls With Yarn painting. I have been working on the drawings and painting off and on all summer. It is in a series of paintings of double or group portraits where the children are connected with a game or task. I think of it as an exploration of relationships.  I am curious how we become interconnected with each other and how it works it's self out in the context of family.

The family is the crucible where we all begin to discover our identity.  We begin to understand who we are in relation to our parents and siblings.  Some of this comes through conflict. We must learn to somehow "get along" and much of this is discovered by "not getting along".  We all long to be apart of a family and to feel at home, whether we ever find it or not is another story.

Creating a work of art is another sort of relationship that involves struggle and the passage of time.  Sometimes a good painting just happens and sometimes it feels like a long losing battle. Like all worthy pursuits making art is plunged into deep mystery where it begins to get good when you finally lose control. 

Perhaps the more solid we are - in who we are, the more deeply we can allow ourselves to fall into mystery. To be loved is to find yourself in the midst of family which most often is something patched together and falling apart at the same time. Our families are like old quilts that have gone through the washer too many times but somehow manage to still keep us warm at night.

(This composition has been very much inspired by Hibiki Miyasaki who's work I dearly love.)