Christine's Blog - Inspiration

My friend asks me where the inspiration came from to paint whatever she is looking at that I painted. Sometimes I don’t know, but I do know that I want to be inspired to paint it.

According to the Huffington Post “Inspiration is defined as something that makes someone want to do something or that gives someone an idea about what to do or create : a force or influence that inspires someone. : a person, place, experience, etc., that makes someone want to do or create something. : a good idea.”

I often wonder what inspired songwriters and musicians to write the songs they write. For me it sometimes is the everyday things, a ray of sunlight, the moon, the way my horse kicks up dust when we are working. Sometimes the huge milestones of life at so powerful to me that I can't help myself. I have to paint the intense feeling. If I don't they come to me at night in a dream.

I’m not necessarily amazed by rodents. I do battle with gophers in my yard. When the field across the road is watered the gophers come to live in my yard. I had some very tall sunflowers swaying in the wind begin to tremble and sink right into the ground once by the underground city gophers built at my front fence connected to the acreage across the street by an underground gopher highway. I have a cat who thankfully hunts them. I was at the front gate yesterday when I noticed lots of new holes at the base of my favorite tree. I was annoyed that I would need to get rid of them so they didn’t kill the roots. I noticed one hole. Earlier I accepted a challenge of producing one black and white photo of something without an explanation and without people. That gopher hole had a pattern on it. It looked like a drawing of a rose, opening to the world for the day. So, my creative self imagined how this gopher created this pattern in the dirt. This will be a rose one day. It will be a big and glorious rose sitting among the leaves that are on the plant. It will be proud it bloomed in the fall where in our climate it gets to be appreciated for a few days, more than it would have in our intensely hot summer. It will be a rose that I clip and bring into the house because I want it to adorn a vase my grandmother gave me. I want to smell it in the house. To me it is a honor to have it close by for however long I have it. 

What inspires you?