Inspiring Creativity

It comes in all shapes and sizes, all colors and forms, subconsciously and quite consciously. As an artist, my mind is drinking in the world around me all the time. I never know when the urge to create something is going to hit me. Yet I also know that the act of creating fuels new ideas. Often-times I find that the act of making a bead I’ve made 1000 times before, is all the fuel my creative fires need to come up with something new. Really, we are all creating something all of the time: our realities. But what I’m talking about here is the creation of an object, a concrete creative result from a conceptual idea. The bringing to fruition a visualization of the mind. Our lives are scattered with inspiration from morning till night, and all the hours in-between. Color combinations and patterns for beads will arise out of the corners of my subconscious mind; sometimes I am able to trace those visual pairings back to a moment in my life, and other times, the impetus never reveals itself to me. This is subconscious creative energy at work.

I read a lot of other artists blogs, and I am frequently amazed at how quirky and similar we all are. How there seems to be this vein that runs through all creative souls, that can’t really be characterized or categorized as anything other than energy. But it’s energy comprised of very similar stuff. Here are some of the other blogs I visit on a regular (read: daily) basis, to explore this comraderie of creative folk:

Notes from the VooDoo Cafe, Rice Zachary-Freeman
Cynthia Thornton from Green Girl Studios
Margot Potter, Bead Queen of the Universe
Swoondimples, Heather Wynn
Ornamental, Nina Bagley

And here is a visual list of the things that are inspire me, refuel me. Most of these images are ones you’ve seen before, but it’s nice to see them all together, in one collage of inspiration: