Well, I thought that I’d talk briefly about the awesome times when artistic inspiration can act like a hologram. As this Youtube video shows even if you only have a small piece of a hologram, you can still see the entire image in it. And artistic inspiration can sometimes work like this too.
Case in point, when I woke up a couple of hours before preparing this article in early May, my mind was filled with random stuff. Not only was the 2024 song “Stone Cold Summer” (warning – brief flicker at 1:49) by South Arcade stuck in my mind but I also randomly found myself fascinated with old button-up denim midi skirts. For half a moment, I imagined wearing one… and I suddenly had a vague sense – more of an emotion/feeling/atmosphere than a mental image – of being a thirty-something woman living in a small British town in the mid-1990s.
This was the starting point for one of next autumn’s original semi-digital paintings, especially since – due to various stresses a couple of weeks earlier – I set myself a “Paint whatever feels best, regardless of how repetitive it is” rule. So, I started sketching what I would look like if I was a thirty-something woman living in a small town in mid-1990s Britain. Of course, I instantly realised that I had to pair the denim skirt with a turtleneck. Then I instinctively realised that I’d be walking back from the shops with a carrier bag on a snowy day, and then…
In an instant, the whole scene unfolded in my imagination. And it was VIVID! I could almost taste the icy cold in the air. I could almost feel the cold and shiny red-painted metal of the snow-covered car parked nearby. I could imagine the 1990s supermarket I had just visited, with brown tiles on the floor, plastic fronds over the refrigerator cabinets and the faint smell of Tea Tree Oil near the pharmacy counter. I knew that there would be a video rental shop in town. The song “Ironic” by Alanis Morisette was stuck in my mind and the year was 1996. The world around me felt more “sensible” and “boring”, but also more relaxing and real and reassuring at the same time. Less frightening than the modern world. A physical feeling of emotional warmth in my chest.
And this was all before I’d finished inking the line art. Even though the pose was fairly boring and there were mistakes, this was one of the most emotionally-satisfying pieces of art that I’ve made in a while. Never let anyone tell you that art is “frivolous” – at it’s very best, making art is pretty much a spiritual experience. Here’s a full-size preview of the finished digitally-edited painting:
(Click for larger image) This semi-digital painting should hopefully be posted here in mid-October next year.
And all of this is an example of artistic inspiration acting like a hologram. I started with literally one detail – a type of denim skirt – and my imagination just extrapolated everything else from it. This style of inspiration doesn’t happen super-often but it is amazing whenever it does.
Whilst it could possibly work as an art exercise – choose a random thing and then imagine everything around it – I’ve found that it tends to happen a bit more spontaneously. Of course, it probably helps if you can think in terms of context. If you do stuff like daydream regularly or read novels or whatever. Or it could just be the way that my mind works and I’m generalising from this. I don’t know, but I find this whole concept fascinating.
How just one random item or detail can suddenly inspire or create an entire realistic world in your imagination within literal seconds. Again, it might not work for literally every piece of art that you make, but it is always cool whenever it happens 🙂
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
