Inspiration discussion...

There is a very intersting discussion about what inspires an artist, or more to the point how can you answer unanswerable questions... My contribution is reposted here...but head over to read many other interesting comments. 

" I very much enjoyed this post. Of course I ask those questions of others and myself. Yet they are indeed unanswerable questions… this is why I often refer to myself as a tool user rather an artist.

When confronted with a piece that thrills me, I find I am most often thinking about 3 questions…

1. What are they trying to say to me?

2. What does it remind me of?

3. How did they do that?

Of course the more important and often most vague question is the first. In the postmodern tumult of a crashing wave of creativity (Nothing new… old stuff just mixed up and rearranged, washed and re-washed) the other questions seem to be attempts at attaching vague and amorphous meaning to our concrete material lives.

Which is really all just fancy talk for trying to describe what happens when you get that “Wow” feeling when you see something that moves you emotionally, whose beauty fires off a refreshing wave of neural activity, causing us to want more. It is that Spark that is art… in both the indescribable act of creativity and in the moment of seeing (an equally mysterious moment). "