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get on it.

11 April 2011

“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. 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

[quote via here through here]
5 Comments leave one →
  1. jeff boone permalink
    11 April 2011 6:18 pm

    totally. david bazan was asked at the living room show we recently attended what inspires his best work. his reply was something along the lines of “there is nothing as inspirational as writing a piece of shit song and trying not to do that again.”

  2. 11 April 2011 6:53 pm

    Love this!

    • 18 April 2011 10:41 pm

      don’t you? thanks for reading/commenting! you have a lovely blog 🙂

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