Inspiration
On the artistic dynamic of inspiration
The role that inspiration plays in the creative arts is an interesting discussion. An example of this dynamic happened in 2009 on my February trip to the Kingshouse Hotel at Rannoch Moor in Scotland.
I had arrived on the Saturday and caught up with David Ward and Phil Malpas who were running a workshop that week from the hotel. That evening the usual exchange of images on a lightbox ensued. Dave Tolcher and I both showed some recent work and then David Ward put up some transparencies. It was seeing one of David’s images on a lightbox three years earlier that prompted me to start making my images with 5×4 cameras.
One of David’s images connected with me. I forget where it was – it might have been Norway or Iceland – but it was a horizontal picture of a rock face with a circular composition. The eye kept going around the image in a circle following the key lines. I could trace the composition with my hand and it somehow imprinted itself in my head.
The following day, whilst David and Phil headed up into the Hidden Valley with Richard Childs, Dave Tolcher and I decided to photograph in Glen Etive in a favourite spot, the deer enclosure. As I looked at the magnificent and colourful rock wall of the river I was reminded of David’s picture and I saw the main image and set up.
It’s interesting how this process works. Because of my aphantasia I am physically incapable of copying a picture directly – I would have to actually take a print of the picture into the field with me and hold it up at eye height to compare! Although I could not recall to mind the detail of what the transparency looked like, the abstract description of it as traced by my hand was indelibly imprinted in my head. The main image has the same compositional device but upright, not horizontal, and in a totally different context. This is one dynamic behind the power of inspiration – the ability to take an abstract idea and place it in a new and fresh context.
After that first image was made, what I later recognised to be flow state kicked in and I saw the opportunity to use my long lens – the 450mm – and isolate a part of the rock wall on the other side of the River Etive (the alternative image). I made four images in total in a two-hour session – profligate for me! Both these images became important to me over the next few years – almost signature-like – and I used one of them for the front cover of Vision and Craft. Both appear in my Alchemy portfolio.
