If you wait around for inspiration, youâll wait forever. On the other hand, you canât grind yourself into dust and expect to get good work done, either.
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| American Eagle at Owl’s Head (unfinished), by Carol L. Douglas |
Friday I woke up profoundly uninspired. My back has been out, and Iâve been taking a mild narcotic. That makes it possible for me to stand upright, but it also reduces my interest in staying upright. Anyways, being in pain is exhausting.
My studio has been a mess, because Iâve been finishing a set of bookcases in it. Normally, this would have been a job for the garage, but itâs still too cold for paint to properly cure. The sky was dismal, and it was following a series of dismal days.
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| A cluttered workspace throws me, and these bookshelves were in the way. |
At 11 AM, I curled up on the couch and took a nap. But Iâm really too Puritan for that. I believe that days off should be doled out judiciously. The difference between success and failure in a competitive field is hard work. It is too easy for artists to fool themselves into thinking theyâre working when theyâre off task.
So at noon I was back at my easel doing what my friend
Sari Gaby calls âborder work.â Thatâs all the background and edges that must be painted thoughtfully but are not central. In the process of limning out the clouds, I realized I wanted Owlâs Head shrouded in one of those localized rains so common on the coast. While itâs only 250 miles as the crow flies from Kittery to Eastport, there are
5,500 miles of Maine coast. That convoluted border between earth and sea has an intoxicating effect on Mother Nature, so it can be pouring in Camden when neighboring Lincolnville is fine.
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Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, copy after Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1558.
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder had a genius for putting the action of the painting somewhere in the background. Itâs a great trick to keep the viewer engaged. One has to hunt to find Icarus in the painting above. (Thatâs a fact remarked on by William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden, among others. Iâve appended their poems on the subject here.) While I wonât go as far as dropping Icarus from the sky, I happily embraced the sea change in the weather. That idea wouldnât have occurred to me had I taken the rest of the day off.
This problem of inspiration is not unique to artists. My husband told me heâs been pondering a software problem for four weeks. âLast night the code came to me, I tried it, and it worked perfectly,â he said on Saturday.
Of course, he didnât spend those four weeks waiting on his muse. He still puts in more than forty hours a week.
There has to be a balance. If you wait around for inspiration, youâll wait forever. On the other hand, you canât work seven days and grind yourself into fine dust and expect to get good work done, either.
