What pushes you to create?

You keep things that didn’t work because there might still be an idea to develop in the future […] You never know. I don’t really like to analyse the way I work. It’s a bit like going down the stairs: if you think about how you’re doing it, you’re bound to trip and fall.1

When I first started thinking about this quote, I thought of framing the question around keeping failed work and the iterative nature of art. The beautiful thing about this process is that, as I think about another artist’s words over a few days, I emerge with a completely different understanding of what I should be focusing on.

What I love about this quote by Glenys Barton is the idea that creative work is something almost instinctual. One can explain the way a shape is made, the steps that are required, but the depth of the creative process remains a mystery.

Where does the instinct to create come from? What is inspiration? Is it a process? Is it like being struck by lightning? How do we nurture it?

I was telling a friend this week that my ideas come from moments of stillness, of boredom. I create in my head weeks or months before I even attempt to translate those ideas in clay. I often sketch, but that’s not a requirement. Why does my process look like it does? I struggle to explain it. Where does my inspiration come from? On the surface, it comes from awe and curiosity for our world. The mystery is in the way the brain guides the hands in translating that sentiment.

Perhaps we should go back to the magnificent words of Polish poet Wisława Szymborska, who, during her Nobel Prize acceptance speech on December 7th 1996 talked about the mystery of inspiration2.

She starts by talking about the popularity of movies about artists: “films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting’s evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke”. However, she notes “…this is all quite naive and doesn’t explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration”. Inspiration is not unique to poets or artists, and perhaps the reason why they cannot explain it is because “it’s just not easy to explain something to someone else that you don’t understand yourself”. Most importantly, she says,“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

Glenys Barton (1944) is a British artist working mostly with clay and bronze. Her work, which is featured in numerous collections and institutions around the world, is concentrated around the human form, particularly faces.