Where do your ideas come from? Your inspiration for your craft? Is it a place, a specific pen you like to use, a special kind of paper or canvas that just speaks to you? For most artists all of these may apply. But maybe none of them apply. Perhaps you’re just the most amazing artist of all and your inspiration just flows freely un-contained and unrestrained from your mind almost at it’s own will into physical reality. So, you ask:
What is my Genesis?
Where does my “special something” come from? How does my process start? Strictly speaking, I’ve never considered this question and I don’t think I’ve ever been asked either. So, please excuse me if my answer takes many twists and turns….hell, I may not even end up answering the question at all! You’ll just have to wait and see.
Architecture, being both the art and science of building, requires both an artistic and analytical mind working sometimes in tandem, but also wholly separate as well. Architects like Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid immediately come to mind as being the ultimate artistic architects. I like to think I exist somewhere in the middle of this “bridge” between analysis and artistic exploration.
My process is sporadic at best. Ideas come to me at the strangest moments – cycling to work, walking in the park, pushing my kids on the swing set, brushing my teeth…it really doesn’t matter. The Genesis of an idea can come anytime because my mind is always trying to process what is around me, what I’ve experienced, where I’ve been and even where I’m going. It is not linear, regular, symmetrical, predictable nor accountable. I’ve sketched on post-its, cocktail napkins, business cards, sketch paper, paper plates, the back of my hand….any surface that will hold ink long enough for me to get “it” down and out of my head.
My process, my Genesis, is an obsession, a compulsion, a twitch, a tick, a social faux-pas, an inconvenience and a glorious expression of the chaos and conundrum that exists between my ears that can only be purged through the communication between brain, arm, hand, fingers, pen and paper (or whatever happens to be readily at hand that will hold a mark). It is never-ending and ever-present, as much a part of me as any physical part or parcel of the me that you see.
And now, what is the genesis of your Genesis, the inspiration in your idea, the impetus of your expression?
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