I take some delight in dreaming up different shapes or sounds of things, art or artifact, that I think  could be brought into the world, based upon that quiet goading from whatever muse is lurking today.  Plenty of others do too,  just look at all the marvelous art, writings,  and handcrafted items on blogs around here! The fact that folks *have* something to put up brings me back, somewhat ashamedly, to the little pokes and prods from the imagination that I allow to just fall away, usually feeling inadequate in skills to the vision, or else too  busy to get beyond putting aside materials for later.

I’ve been more focused on this since the other day, when I read a question on the blog “Over Coffee…” that hit a little close to home. In her blog post, Does our Imagination Inspire Us to Act? Barb Hartsook pondered, “If I don’t act on the imagined, what have I achieved?”

Ulp.  I’d have to say, in my case,  not much more than stored raw materials.

While trying to come up with a post a couple of weeks ago, I had half an ear cocked to an argument on television between financial analysts on what needs to be done to bring the banking system back to health. The phrase that caught my attention was “taking away the toxic assets from Wall Street…”  Our congress sees the toxic assets as impenetrably complex paper instruments of bundled, currently unquantifiable debt. My mind sees a pen-and-ink cartoon of a dour-looking group of investment-bank executives being led, by serious men in guard uniforms, onto waiting buses marked, “Camp Fed”; the  drawing captioned, “taking away Wall Street’s Toxic Assets”.

Aha! Goading from a muse! >Poke, poke<…“Do this, it’ll be fun!” >Prod, prod<…

My response: “That’d be fun; I’d like to see that” mumbled to myself, and on I go with whatever I’d been doing. I told family about the image that’d popped up and they said, “you should do that!”  To which I hemmed and hawed, and said “someone who can draw, now, should do that. Besides, someone might get really offended.”   Yet, I have pens, pencils, brushes, ink, paper and, given two or three days warning, a small desk I could clear, without resorting to explosives, to have a flat surface.  I hope this doesn’t mean I’m just collecting art supplies, but it happens all the time, doesn’t it?

To wit:
• Whistling…>poke< …hm, nice tune…do I go to the piano, work it out and write it down? Not any more.
• Rolling words around in the mouth because you like the feel of them and the rhythm the syllables make…>poke< Hm…a good lyric.  Does it go into a notebook?  That notebook is put away.
• Working on this post brought the design for what I think would make a charming ceramic tea kettle (Thanks Barb!).  Will I try to craft such a thing?

After this whinge about tossing the gifts of imagination to the wind to carry off, I’d like to think so.

How do you overcome your particular inertia?

At least, if I’m already absorbed in creative practice or play, the pokes and whispers of imagination within the task are heeded. Just for ducks, because the end result hss been posted here before,  here’s how looking for a fractal image for a contest went, long ago.
Okay, let’s start with this- -spiral thingy.

Hm. Let’s snazz up the color a bit…looks like structured pizza.

Naw,  that’s really not it. Let’s try red and gold shadings.

>poke Hey! Redraw with the upper right quadrant of the spiral to fill the frame! There’re faces!<

Hm, those look like faces. We’ll just use the frame to alter the width and skew it a bit.

>Poke, poke< It’s a demonic-looking clown, like a monster movie! >prod, poke<

Man, that’s one wei…

>Poke, poke poke…Look at the top, there are ears beside that crown-thing, a snout and a pair of strange curling things<

…rd clown-face. I’ll just record this thing to come back to and make a palette for mousy gray-brown and see what those ears and the snout do.  With any luck, it’ll be animal-like for the contest.

>Woohoo! It’s a bat, change colors and clean up the image to keep the spiral of bats!  Poke, poke<

I’ll be darned, I bet with broadening and  a few alterations to the palette that could be brought out more clearly   And what’s a bat with furled wings doing right side up? I’ll invert it. Of course, this keeps my record of finding weird while others are finding  beauty intact for the contest.

May you have better courage with your inspirations  than I!

Cheers!

pete