Inspiration, often found in unexpected places.
In my creative journey, that only started a couple of years ago, I found inspiration to be very cross-disciplinary. As a photographer, or let's say, a photography student, I made the mistake to only look at other photographers work for inspiration.
Which at first, when I started my masters in photography, seemed fine. Now feels severely limiting. Seeking inspiration for your art, only in your discipline enables you to copy instead of taking inspiration because you only look at pictures to make pictures.
I could be wrong for saying that, and again, it's only an opinion.
Inspiration can be found in the littlest things, I came to find out. I gathered inspiration from many, many different art forms such as; Music videos, movies, concerts, visualizers, graphic design, fashion,..
Going to art shows also helped because you get to experience the work as the artist intended it to be watched, apposed to only getting to experience it via the artist's website or places such as Instagram.
Instagram is great, don't get me wrong. I use it the same way you would use Pinterest. I save pictures and videos on it all the time, and it's a great place to discover young, relatively unknown artists, but the sense of scale and detail just isn't there.
The main take away from this, already way too long post, would be to open up your mind to see, and take in, all of the different forms inspiration shows itself in. The usage of light at concerts or shows, composition in paintings or movies, different shapes and textures, smells,.. could all be used to shape your art.
Take this picture for example. This portrait of my friend Floor, taken awhile ago now, is the result of looking at some of arguably some of the greatest portrait photographers of all time in combination with reading up on some articles Magnum Photos published on photographing Audrey Hepburn.
After the publication of this image, a few people actually commented on the resemblance of the great actress and the influence her presence had in what some would call the "golden era of Hollywood". If that isn't a compliment, I don't know what is.
