Looking for Inspiration

So, I have these wonderful beads sitting in front of me. They are the beads that were just released for the 2010 Beading For A Cure charity/challenge project. I have a couple of ideas perched in the back of my head, and I have the enamel colors to make accompanying pieces. I have the copper cut and ready to shape, and I'm ready to go.....except....LIFE IS GETTING IN MY WAY. Instead of being able to spend today shaping copper and trying out colors on small copper bits, I have to spend today cleaning my workspace and going to an appointment across town to discuss this IRS stuff (mentioned in yesterday's blog) with someone who may be able to translate IRS-talk into common speak. How I wish for "clarity and transparency" in legalese-speak. But it's like any other industry - it creates terminology to define it's concepts, and then the invented terminology takes on its' own life and existence. Rather like self-perpetuated hell.

So do artists have their own invented and self-perpetuating terminology? Of course we do. For example, we borrow terms from other fields (hues and values), and we create our own terms and/or definitions (pigments and fold-forming). Over time and with the addition of more technology, our dictionary of specialized terms increases, until it is an entirely new language. Through the morass of moving alphabetic terms, the artist defines the tools of his/her trade.

One item can be defined many ways. Looking at a flower may inspire many things - a poem, a story, a painting, a song, a dance, or in my case, a piece of copper with melted glass or an item made from small, pierced, pieces of glass woven into a patterned sequence. So, among my assigned tasks today is to take some time to find some inspiration while I'm out and about. The weather should be excellent for February, so I'll take a couple of hours for myself and celebrate the Creator and my personal muse, thanking them for my incredible luck and their amazing love. I challenge you to take a bit of time and find your own inspiration. Then work through the terms of your art to bring this inspiration into a new, artistic creation. What terms (methodologies) will you use? Maybe you will invent our next addition to the Artist's Dictionary.