"Inspiration is for Amateurs"

"Mysterious Man" - In Progress  

Oil on Canvas, 6" sq., c. Catherine Vines

   

I'll bet this man's mother thought he was as beautiful as "Dylan" (see yesterday's post) once upon a time, maybe even now.

I picked this photo to paint because it fit into an abandoned canvas. Sometimes painting is about the doing, rather than waiting for inspiration to hit. Sometimes that can be a long wait. Or as Chuck Close says:

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