Don't Give Up, Inspiration May Sneak Up on You.

Wherever I go, I am always finding inspiration for more paintings. Sometimes, I see something that looks perfect, snap a bunch of photographs, and then sigh with discouragement when the resulting images are a disappointment. That is just what happened when I visited family in Florida last year. The light dancing through the branches of some beautiful live oak trees caught my eye. I snapped away, taking pictures of the trees with Spanish moss dripping off of the branches. When I got home from the trip, and looked at the photographs, I wasn't moved at all. Rather than be discouraged, I just waded through other photographic possibilities.

I keep scads of resource photographs on my computer and my iPad. This has been a boon to finding inspiration when my imagination wanes. It is a good idea to have your photographic resource organized into folders that are labeled to make sense to you. I am not as organized as I would like to be, so I am going to give myself the challenge of doing just that this year. In the meantime, when I am looking for my next painting or series of paintings, I look at my resource. Something always catches my eye.

Having given up on the Spanish moss draping the branches of the live oak as a painting possibility, imagine my surprise when I was moved to make a painting of one of those photographs? I tried to talk myself out of it, thinking that my initial response must have been a correct one, but I couldn't let it go.

I have included the photo resource. I do not aim to replicated a photograph exactly. As you can see, I cropped, changed the proportions, and also changed the colors for the final piece as compared to the photograph. This is the result of listening to my gut and going for it.