Where Do Ideas Come From

Where Do Ideas Come From?

Where do ideas come from? The question reminds me of being a father when my sons were young boys. “Dad, how tall is the sky?” Fair question. I suppose “Pretty tall,” might be a fair answer but probably would not suffice. If that answer was followed by, “Hey, you want to go get some ice cream?” Maybe the problem would be postponed for awhile or maybe newer more practical questions that could be answered would be forth coming.

For me, ideas come from a conglomeration of a lot of things; personal experience, other ideas (both my own and other artists) fairly obvious considerations like portraits of people or landscapes or possibly still life arrangements. Whatever the prospect, an idea has to have something about it that is sort of intangibly mysterious and above all, interesting. What makes something interesting? Well, here we are back to that original problem. It is different for everybody and difficult to answer but I know it when I see it.

I love to paint and draw the human figurative form. Faces are exceptionally interesting as well. I love to go out in a beautiful environment and sit down with canvas, palette, paint and brushes and portray what I am seeing and experiencing around me. Still life painting is also a lot of fun. Setting up a still life with various objects that have some kind of symbolic meaning and than painting that arrangement can be a very interesting and psychologically telling endeavor. Again, it is fun.

I think the “ideas” kind of come with the action. When I am looking at something I might think, “Huhn, I wonder what would happen if I put a little yellow under that bright green there.” or “That could probably use a bright blue line around the top of that area of red.” Where did those thoughts come from? Well, I guess we could ask ourselves where any thoughts come from. When I start to speculate on such things I do often times start to think about maybe going out and getting some ice cream or maybe just a cup of coffee.