There was a quote from Chuck Close on A.C.T. Art MArketing Blog part of which rang true to me:
If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself.
I don’t put the entire quote here because I am not all that sure about the beginning which is about inspiration being for amateurs and because the rest merely expands on the excerpt above.
It’s a fact, at least for me, that waiting around for an idea or looking at work of others gets me nowhere and eventually it feels like I’ve got a solid brick in my brain that makes it impossible to create anything. I do enjoy looking at what other artists do, by the way. I could do it all day long, it just does not help with the problem at hand. Drawing without much expectation is far better. I can abandon the original idea before I get too far, change it while it’s still changeable, throw the entire thing away because it refuses to cooperate, or base another drawing on the original failure. All of it is still more productive than waiting for a miracle to happen on its own.
There is no shortage of advice on getting inspired and getting over a creative block; I trust it makes a real difference for others, but for some reason it’s not doing much to me. Maybe I am approaching it the wrong way?