How to be inspired.

A few weeks back, my friend Deanne Farrell, fundraiser extraordinaire for Rowan University, forwarded an article to me from the Dodge Foundation.

The piece, by Wendy Liscow, was about thanking the teaching artists who had a major influence on her life.

Immediately, I thought of Bill Daley.

Bill is the renowned ceramic artist and educator who headed that department when I was at University of the Arts.

I was in the fibers department and I never took ceramics.

But there was a vaguely named (“Craft Seminar” maybe?), fuzzily defined  and yet required class for everyone in crafts. I think it was supposed to prepare us for life in the real world, where some of us would be looking for commissions and that sort of thing.

The faculty took turns teaching it, and in my junior year, Bill was the teacher.

His sweet, goofy personality made the class bearable for those of us who were wondering, ‘what are we even doing here? I need to do my real work.’

He once gave me a Hershey bar with almonds for drawing the best ellipse in the class! (And I have no idea why we were drawing ellipses. I'm sure Bill had a good reason.)

But in that class, from Bill, I learned something that dramatically changed how I thought about the creative process.

Bill was talking about sketching, about generating ideas. Sort of haranguing us, in a good-natured way, to get to sketching for some assignment.

He didn’t want just one sketch, he wanted us to think of all the variations on an idea, to come up with stuff and then riff off of it.

A lot of artists wait around for inspiration to strike, like lightning, he said (and this was more than 20 years ago, so forgive me, I’m paraphrasing this whole thing).

But the way to get ideas is to just keep working, day after day.

You can't wait til you're in the right mood.

There is no right mood.

It doesn’t matter if you’re coming up with crappy ideas.

You have to go through a ton of ideas you’ll never use in order to come up with the really good ones (and I heard echoes of this thought in Linchpin).

It’s a process. That’s where inspiration comes from – the process.

I wrote this post and then looked up Bill’s site –- I wasn’t even sure he had one (and it looks great!) -- and read his artist’s statement. It sounds like he’s still thinking along these lines:

Studio time is a kind of morphology: A quickener of tacit cues, which slows down my head to allow “seeping time,” as I work with tools in hand. I call it practice: The wonderings of If. “If” as add-venturing, “If” as play, serendipity, or chance. “if” as the alternatives of un-thought: Intuitions and feelings that morph my parts and pieces into holds. “Holds” nudge more pro-found possibles for what I thought I was trying to do with “now and then” or “how and why.”

Practice.

That piece of advice has stuck with me for all these years.

It completely reshaped my approach to any kind of creative work.

I think about it almost every day.

I’m pretty sure you don't remember me, but thanks, Bill.

It made such a difference.