As artists we always in making our work, dance with two partners, and we are often held to the same regard as most pop cultural ideas of art making, the artist pondering some vital landscape… the artist receiving like a ball of light the revelation of some new piece… When in fact more than 80% of the total experience of making art is sweat and grit and work. It speaks well of the distilled and potent superpowers that inspiration possesses that it would despite its marginal affect, occupy such a lofty and present sphere, but an idea with out tangible agency is a carpenter without a hammer.

Inspiration: the Muse or the lightening strike… (or whatever you want too call it), hat out of no where blossoming of thought and invention whether it s a solve to an image puzzle or a concept trap or simply the burst of creativity that drives a painting.

Perspiration: The inevitable footwork required to execute the thing that Inspiration brought to you. The day to day brick laying or structural realities of telling a story and meeting those points well so they execute the idea in the best possible way.

While it’s easy to think that you get INSPIRED and then you PERSPIRE, really both fertilize the other, and the overall process of making work, if you’re doing it right, is to allow for the skip dance between them both. The Work and labor can trigger an inspiration moment, and all the inspiration absolutely requires the labor that goes into the perspiration aspects of the enterprise. An idea in your head is not art, the thing you make in response to it could be. The art comes from the work, whatever its motivation.

You don’t actually have to be inspired to make a good piece of art- it’s not nearly as fun and I would like to go on the record as saying that the work no matter how good or well executed, crafted or designed will with a lack of inspiration ever be as good as it could have been with it.