I’ve been doing this show for about 5 1/2 years now—since the summer of 2018—and people sometimes ask me “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, they come from many different directions: from reading, from talking to friends, from things I see, things I hear. And sometimes apparently, just out of the blue. But rarely do any of these ideas come as much more than just a little inkling. Even when I think that I’ve got ahold of something that will make a good show, once I get the idea down on paper, I realize that that’s only the very beginning of a process that I’m going to have to work through in order to expand it into something that’s complete.
I wish that inspiration came in greater totality, in a more complete package, but it rarely does.
This is what artists of all kinds, from writers to painters to composers, have to contend with and I think a lot of people misunderstand inspiration. Yes, inspiration is a huge part of art, but inspiration, when it comes, just brings along with it a drawn-out requirement of more exploration and hard work. Yes, there are those rare times in the life of an artist when an idea bursts upon the consciousness and carries through with a striking totality: those times in which inspiration strikes and then the artist inherits from it a work that is complete. But most of the time, inspiration—that element that the Greeks hailed as this mysterious gift from the muses—leaves nothing behind but a seed that is no closer to a finished product than an acorn is to an oak tree. The quotation that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration” is usually attributed to Thomas Edison, or sometimes to Albert Einstein: an inventor or a theoretical physicist. But it’s impossible to think that no artist ever put that feeling into words before.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago I think that I’m reading a novel by Emile Zola right now called The Masterpiece and that’s where all this has come from. It’s about an artist and his struggles to turn his impulses and talent into something substantive. He doesn’t meet with much success, and he ever vacillates between thinking of himself as talented or even a genius, and thinking of himself as a hack and failure.
An artist has to fight with an inspiration to bring it to fruition. But you also have to work pretty hard to get a sense of what that fruition is even going to be. One of the difficulties an artist has is that you don’t know if what you want is going to work or not, or if the direction you go will be the right one. It’s a very frustrating thing to not have your work turn out the way you’re trying to make it turn out. It’s a feeling that every artist knows, but not many other people understand.