Day #193 Priming Brush

I have been asked a lot since I began this daily painting project how I get the inspiration for each day. This has made me wonder what inspiration is. I have tried to use my daily life as a starting point for the subject matter in 'Dan Young, Daily' but finding a 'thing' to paint is not the only element of inspiration. The spark that makes me want to paint something is way more difficult to define. It is a feeling and an urge that makes me need to record something in visual form, very much the way a traditional diarist might be compelled to record their days events. I will be honest it doesn't always happen smoothly and sometimes tapping into a tiny bit of inspiration every day can be like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste from it's tube. Other times inspiration falls out of my paintbrush like a tap! 

When 'toothpaste squeezing' I find myself wandering around the house/garden/studio/local park or anywhere looking for inspiration (whatever that may be!).  It doesnt always work! 

 

I then turn to the internet (that great solver and creator of modern day problems) but I find it can be a huge sprawling mass of images and ideas (1654 images on this blog alone!) you will find things that were made yesterday alongside things made 100's or 1000's years ago. I have recently discovered, as someone who revels in images, that Pinterest is an amazing way of sifting through and collecting inspirational pictures and tying them together in a way that makes sense to me. I use it as a place for recording those ideas and imagery that might feed back in to my mind at a later time, or simply somewhere to save a cool picture of something cool that I think is cool. 

I made a board I call 'Painterly Painterliness' to save images of paintings and painters that get my painty juices flowing have a look here. I find it a great place to start if I find myself 'squeezing toothpaste' or if I want to have a look at paintings and painters I really enjoy and have been, or will be, influenced by.

Todays painting is this hanging priming brush, precariously hooked on the old guitar string, one of the key influences and inspirations for this years painting is the genre of Dutch still lives. I find some of the many and varied inventive ways of presenting an object really interesting and hanging things from other things seems like a great way of getting it all in there.

 



In the spirit of Pinterest's #pinitforward campaign it is my honour to introduce coldknees to you all, a very different blogger but equally excited by colour by the looks of it! Over to you tomorrow Rachel.