If you are a serious creator of art, you don’t wait for inspiration. You show up. Sometimes you fail. Most of the time you fail. But the next day you show up. Ultimately the creativity gods, noticing your devotion, invite you into the holy realm. But first they ask for a sacrifice – devotion, faith in yourself and your art, persistence.

The artist who waits for inspiration is dead in the water.  Finished, washed up, before he or she started.  Inspiration comes halfway or three-quarters of the way or ninety percent of the way through creating a work of art.  Okay, maybe sometimes it comes before, but if it does, in my experience, it comes only after a week or a month of working on other projects.

Sometimes, I may do a painting that takes several months and when it is finished, I am exhausted.  Then the very next day I will get an idea or a notion about wanting to do something, and do it spontaneously, and hit it right on the nose.

Once I was talking to Robert Frost about a poem of his that is so beautifully written, it is considered by some to be actually perfect.  It is called 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.'  And I asked him, "You must have worked a long time on that.  It must have been done in the middle of the winter.  What was your experience?"  He said, 'Andy, I'll tell you about that.  I'd been writing a very complicated, long-drawn-out poem, almost a story type of poem entitled 'Death of a Hired Man.' I had finished at two o'clock in the morning.  It was a hot August night, and I was exhausted.  I walked out on the porch of my house and looked at the mountain range.  It came to me in a flash!  I wrote it on an envelope I had in my pocket, and I only changed one word.  It came out just like that."

- Andrew Wyeth, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth

. . .

Do you find yourself waiting for inspiration? Do you show up regardless? If not, do you believe in yourself and your art?

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   
His house is in the village though;   
He will not see me stopping here   
To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   
To stop without a farmhouse near   
Between the woods and frozen lake   
The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   
To ask if there is some mistake.   
The only other sound’s the sweep   
Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   
But I have promises to keep,   
And miles to go before I sleep,   
And miles to go before I sleep.