Sometimes you get into a creative funk, and have a hard time making art.
You want to make art, but procrastinate, scroll, organize, and do everything else.
This is OK. We all have ebbs and flows.
But here are 3 things to read when you need inspiration to start again.
Hawthorne On Painting
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by Mrs. Charles W. Hawthorne
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Read the introduction. It’s 4 pages.
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Hawthorne reflects on the reasons for painting and having vision.
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Inspiration for the friendly and existential. Here’s an excerpt:
Anything under the sun is beautiful if you have the vision-it is the seeing of the thing that makes it so. The world is waiting for men with vision-it is not interested in mere pictures. What people subconsciously are interested in is the expression of beauty, something that helps them through the humdrum day, something that shocks them out of themselves and something that makes them believe in the beauty and the glory of human existence.
Letters To A Young Poet
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by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Read the Paris chapter. Its the first chapter. 5 pages long.
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Rilke explains the importance of beauty and individuality.
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Inspiration for those who need a direct, tough love approach. Here’s an excerpt:
Therefore, protect yourself from stale motifs and turn to your own life. Portray your sorrows and daydreams, your passing thoughts and beliefs stirred by a glimpse of beauty. Describe it all with a quiet, humble honesty, using the things themselves, the images of your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your daily life seems too bleak, don’t blame it-blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its wealth.
My First Summer In The Sierra
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by John Muir
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Read the first chapter. Especially the June 5.
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Muir captures the beauty of nature with poetic prose.
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Inspiration for those who love nature and grandeur. Here’s an excerpt:
The whole landscape showed design, like man’s noblest sculptures. How wonderful the power of its beauty! Gazing awe-stricken, I might have left everything for it. Glad, endless work would then be mine tracing the forces that have brought forth its features, its rocks and plants and animals and glorious weather. Beauty beyond thought everywhere, beneath, above, made and being made forever.
These are all inexpensive books.
Great for your coffee table or art desk.
Pick them up when you need some inspiration.
Let the words break you free from creative funk.