Craig Keeling

Inspiration comes from whatever it is that inspires, not just from studying art books or visually dismantling works to analyze the composition and elements for the purpose of understanding basics. Inspiration can come from something simple, like watching people at an airport. It can come from something extremely complex, as is being under the influence of a strong and strange compound, foreign to pliable nerve cells. It can also come from throwing eggs at a plexiglass wall while singing—It comes from anything and everything.

To claim that inspiration is something you put behind once you reach a “professional level” is to say that at some point in time your mind will cease to become enlightened, by anything. No need for senses, nor books—no longer would you even need to communicate with other people, if inspiration were solely experienced by amateurs.

In the same basic reasoning an atomic physicist or a manufacturer of plastic toys could explain—that you cannot create something from nothing, our ideas and artistic pursuits come not from a vacuum of empty space within the mind, but rather from the spectrum of our insights and perceptions of experience.

This is not to say, of course, that our culture can progress if everyone is laying around “dreaming” all day, waiting to be inspired. Steven Pressfield wisely noted in his book “The War of Art” that when the writer, Somerset Maugham, was asked whether he wrote according to a schedule or only when he was struck by inspiration, he replied, “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”

If inspiration is for amateurs, I’ll aspire to be a professional amateur.