16 December 2016

Inspiration how ideas are born

Article written by:
Corrado Manenti

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In every object, representation and work of art, the main engine that moves the hand of the artist is what was considered in Romanticism as an inner genius.

By the Stilnovist poets it was represented by angelic women, while in ancient Greece it took the form of a muse: inspiration.

It is very difficult to define an abstract concept like inspiration; like a colour, it can only be felt, seen, internalised.

Inspiration, like so many related sensations, is changeable, capricious, and feeds on experience and the present: it is extremely difficult to simulate it, it would be a bit like trying to change one's mood arbitrarily and becoming happy in a moment of great sadness.

That is why inspiration has no past time or certain future: unique and unrepeatable emotion, one cannot seek it out, but must accept its inevitable fleetingness and be grateful for the time one has had to enjoy it.

That is why an artist is driven by impulse, by artistic eagerness, at the beginning of his work: to preserve and to blow on the spark of inspiration he has been granted by the Muse.

Of course, inspiration is not enough to create an artist, it must be compensated and enhanced by good technical preparation and the natural ability of the subject. in creating their art, but what makes a true artist is the ability to encode their feeling into something concrete: to make the metaphysical physical, the pure spirit material, whether it is expressed through oil on canvas, rhyming verse or silk fabric draped over the body.

To the trained eyes of an aesthete, a work of art will appear more or less beautiful due to a series of factors and static stylistic rules, but what will make him fall in love with it is the power of sensation emanating from within the work itself.

This is the beginning of the long journey to begin one's artistic journey, a journey that begins in a spiritual manner and comes to fruition through an object, or objects, with the aim of making the mystical concrete, in an almost divine manner.