An article by Mikkel Urup
How does inspiration arise?
Being inspired is a productive state for any artist. As an artist myself, I’ve noticed certain patterns that seem to govern the otherwise elusive nature of the muse.
What follows is not an absolute statement but more of my personal work notes. Just as a hero is useless without food and drink, an artist is useless without inspiration. To grow artistically, it is essential to be inspired. This makes the following questions central: What is the nature of the muse, where does she dwell, how can she be summoned, and where is it absolutely certain she will never appear?
First, let’s establish that you won’t find inspiration if you remain disengaged or uninterested in the impressions life offers. You must invest something of yourself, some of your life, in the process of “digesting” these impressions. You need to experience, feel, and sense deeply. It’s not enough to mechanically archive these impressions like a computer; you must be “struck” by the experience—the more intensely, the better.
An everyday experience can be a fantastic source of inspiration, but only if you truly and intensely experience it. Conversely, an extraordinary experience can be utterly uninspiring if it doesn’t “hit” you. The painter Paul Klee, in a 1920 lecture, uses an analogy where the artist is a tree drawing strength from its roots to create its crown. The roots are life’s experiences, and the crown is the artist’s creation.
It almost seems like a mathematical equation: Life force (not necessarily your own) + impressions = inspiration. This inspiration can be stored for later use or immediately channeled into creating something vibrant.
To put it even more succinctly: Life + impressions = Life + expression.
If we omit “life” from the equation, we get nothing more than a mechanical reflection of impressions, similar to what a video camera without a cameraman would produce. When we add a living being, like a cameraman who engages with what he sees, we get a vivid expression to look at afterward.
This simple “equation” is my tool for avoiding the dreaded “painter’s block.” It becomes significantly easier to see which situations are not conducive to inspiration. For a painter, the most uninspiring thing might be a blank canvas; for a writer, perhaps a blank sheet of paper. These states can drown your artistic vision like quicksand. The exception is when, in confronting “emptiness,” you allow previous impressions to crystallize. One could say that emptiness can act as a catalyst, bringing past experiences to the surface of your consciousness.
But more often than not, emptiness is a bottomless pit.
I know a painter who took time off from his regular job to dedicate himself fully to painting. To his horror, he found that he was suddenly completely uninspired and unable to produce anything. My advice to him was to quickly return to work. Oddly enough, this helped.
It seems that sensory impressions are the antidote to an uninspired state of mind. Many artists sit in a void, without inspiration, trying to force something out—it’s like trying to go to the bathroom for no reason. There’s a fear of starting, a fear of making mistakes; everything must be perfect from the outset. I’ve struggled with this myself: One day, I had one of my greatest artistic realizations: Never be afraid of a blank canvas—the less reverence you have for it, the better.
It’s an incredible relief to discover that starting the creative process with little inspiration can often kickstart the inspiration itself. Suddenly, that big, ugly splotch of paint on the large, empty white canvas can become quite inspiring. Two large, uninspired blobs are infinitely more inspiring than the empty, naked, pristine canvas. Before you know it, you’re fully immersed in the creative process. You just need to warm up. Stage fright, after all, isn’t cured in the wings; it’s always cured on the stage.
Philosophically, it’s an intriguing question: Is it possible to create something without any prior inspiration? I believe the answer is yes, but I think it only applies to the first stroke you place on the canvas. The placement of the next stroke will be inspired by the first. So, it’s possible that the sources of inspiration can be confined within the four walls of the canvas. This is perhaps typical of abstract art, where one strives for an expression entirely independent of our everyday experiences.
The Creative Process
Once the creative process begins, a dynamic interplay occurs between sensing your evolving artistic creation and holding on to your original vision for the work. These two forces don’t always pull in the same direction; it’s easy to veer off course. However, this detour can be fruitful. Suddenly, you find yourself far off the beaten path, lost in the wilderness, where new growth thrives, and the sunlight filters through the treetops in unexpected ways. I experience this as the unfinished painting becoming a powerful magnet, making it impossible to pull away.
I’ve noticed something peculiar about this. You don’t feel particularly tired during the creative process. It’s only afterward, when the creative fire has burned out, that you might suddenly realize you haven’t slept, rested, or eaten for a day, but you don’t notice it while you’re working. The mental energy can be so overwhelming that the body’s physical energy seems insignificant. After nine hours of continuous creative work, I’m usually a bit “spent” (having poured everything out), but energy-wise and mood-wise, I’m on top of the world. After another hour or two, I typically realize that my body is completely exhausted. What usually follows are a few days of gathering new impressions, like a witch collecting herbs for a magical potion. When I’ve gathered enough “herbs,” I’m ready to brew again, and as the brew mixes, I’m bewitched by the aroma, and a new creative phase begins. Mental energy/life force and the body’s physical energy feel like two very different things to me.
How long does it take to come up with a good idea? – It can happen incredibly fast. Some people are shocked that a painter—after coming up with an idea—might only spend an hour executing it. He then sells the painting for 10,000 kroner. There’s nothing to be outraged about; perhaps it’s the only idea he has all year. The quality of art cannot be measured by the hours spent on it. Some of my best paintings were created in less time than I care to admit, while I worked on a quite mediocre painting for seven years before it was finished.
The Individual Language
Being inspired doesn’t necessarily mean that what you create is particularly good! You might have a fantastic understanding or feeling within your own universe but no earthly idea how to technically convey it to others. The quality of expression also depends on your technical mastery of the “language” chosen for your art form. “Language” here is understood in the broadest sense as the “medium” for your communication or expression. The language could be the pictorial or musical language as a main group, and more specifically, your individual artistic language that can be perceived and understood by others. This language might be unique to a single work or shared across several works. In the latter case, others might recognize the artist’s “language” as their style, in other words: what makes a Van Gogh a Van Gogh.
If you don’t have an artistic language or overarching artistic intentions, it can be challenging to know what to do with all these sensory impressions. Composer Igor Stravinsky described in 1946 how the absolute freedom to use inspiration for anything is a chasm. Only by imposing limits and constraints on creation can you secure a sustainable artistic foundation.
It takes time to develop your own language, your own artistic universe. In such a subjective universe, there are certain laws, priorities, and attitudes. Some of these laws are enduring in the artist’s private universe, much like the law of gravity in our shared universe. Other laws are more fluid and exploratory—perhaps a bit like modern atomic physics, constantly shifting towards a more clearly defined picture—only to suddenly change completely due to a new insight into the nature of things.
The Nature of Inspiration
It’s fascinating that one person can inspire another. The person who is inspired by someone else actually receives a life force from another person. I find this “awakening” to be the most astonishing aspect of inspiration. You can breathe life into someone who has drowned in routine and lives a life with little engagement. This person can meet someone who manages to inspire them to break free from their “emptiness” and change their life in a more exciting direction.
“Spiritus” means spirit in Latin. “Inspire” means to breathe in or blow into (from Latin: in + spirare, to breathe/blow). Inspiration means inhalation or blowing in; you can be inspired yourself, and you can inspire others. Originally, life must have been defined as the ability to inhale and exhale. That which breathes has life. The more inspired, the more alive. The more mechanical, the more dead. What happens when a relationship dies? – It stops breathing. Life is that which can communicate, and death is that which cannot.
How do you avoid living a life that’s the living dead—a life without inspiration? I believe the most important thing is to continually invest your heart and soul while sensing and experiencing. The problem in relationships between people often arises because they’ve put their perception of the world on autopilot; they’ve even put their communication on autopilot. How much of what is said is truly meant, and how much is just a routine exchange of rehearsed standard remarks?
Look at a man in love—he’s alive; he intensely experiences the presence of the other person. I don’t think love is a prerequisite for inspiration, but I definitely believe that curiosity, or the ability to experience things, is absolutely essential for inspiration to appear. When things become tiresome, or when you feel you “can’t take it anymore,” inspiration finds it especially difficult to make an entrance. And yet, if you suddenly indulge in and experience your own anguish, you’re back on the right track. If you experience and embrace what’s painful, it can be inspiring. If you shut it out, it certainly won’t be.
My whole point is that inspiration isn’t something you sit around waiting for—it’s there all the time. You just need to dare to breathe in life with the volume turned up on all your senses. I believe most people only utilize a minimal part of their creative abilities, their ability to create art as well as their life in general. The big mistake is sitting passively, waiting to be inspired. It’s perhaps symptomatic of our television culture. We wait for something to happen so we can react to it. There’s sports on TV—we talk about sports. The frost bites your nose—we curse the weather gods. It’s a passive way of doing things. You need to get out and actively seek out your sources of inspiration; you need to drink from them, bathe in them, and above all, let them hit you.
What characterizes artists is a bit like what characterizes explorers: the urge to experience something fantastic and meaningful, perhaps entirely new horizons, perhaps entirely new worlds with different natural laws. So where are these experiences, these sources of inspiration? It’s like looking for grains of sand on a beach. The problem isn’t that they aren’t there. The problem is that they’re everywhere: the rain sliding down autumn leaves, a slug sliced in half by a bicycle tire, your child’s smile as the steak battles the potatoes. When was the last time you noticed how your office actually looks? What color are your partner’s eyes? How does a rotting leaf smell? If you really noticed how your office looked, you’d likely get an idea of how it should be redecorated, right?
The exciting experiences aren’t waiting in vacation resorts; they’re everywhere. After a deep, deep breath, follows an exhale. Don’t hold your breath just because you’re afraid of having bad breath. Let it flow out, and let others breathe in your exhale. Then keep breathing deeply and fully.
Mikkel Urup