March 10, 2015 – Where do ideas come from?

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Right now I’m working on a new, big (it’s 40”x40”) painting that is very different from anything else I’ve ever painted.  It’s a collage based on an image of me standing in front of one of the clocks inside the Museé d’Orsay in Paris, the beautiful museum in the old train station building which houses the French national collection of Impressionist art.  The original photo was nearly black and white – I took out the white and layered it over the image I used to paint “Paris Roses.”

Both of the photos were taken on the same trip to Paris in late spring of 1998.  I went with Karen, a friend of my brother Matt’s.  We were single ladies who wanted to go to Europe and didn’t have anyone to go with.  Matt connected us – we had dinner and went to a movie in Mill Valley and decided it would work to travel for two weeks together! I speak French and Karen speaks Castillian Spanish. We went to Paris, St. Remy in Provence and Barcelona.  It was one of the best two weeks of my life.

And our last day in Paris was one of the most memorable days. Karen is a tennis player and fan of the sport.  Roland Garros (the French Open) was just starting. We went out to see if we could get tickets and ended up with center court seats to see Martina Hingis and Pete Sampras play matches our last day in Paris. It was fun for me to experience the big-time tennis world and it was a thrill for Karen to watch these greats play.  Afterwards, we returned to Paris and ended up in a place called something like “Le Bar American” on rue Keller in the 11^th.  Frank Sinatra had recently died and they were playing his music all evening. Karen is trained opera singer with a beautiful voice and grew up in New Jersey singing all the old standards.  She sang along as we drank pretty colored drinks in lovely stemmed glasses.  I think we had charmed the bartenders – they didn’t want us to leave, so they went to the brasserie across the street to get menus and then shuttled our food over to us!

We left there – pretty looped – and made our way to the Gare de Lyon to take the night train to the south.  We shared our 4-couchette  compartment with just one other person – a sweet, young French guy. As we got underway, Karen decided to treat us by singing “O mio bambino caro” a very popular Puccini aria – it’s one I’m a sucker for!  She sang at full volume – I was transfixed with that I-can’t-believe this-is-actually-happening-to-me-feeling – a private opera, on a train leaving Paris.  The magic of this memory will live in me forever. Every time I recall the story, I feel it all over again.

I think the enchantment of this trip and that day is in this painting I’m now working on.  It’s remarkable for me to think that the silhouette in this photo Karen took of this clock is actually me.  She seems so elegant and feminine – timeless even.  I love how you can see my fingers hanging down from the railing.

As I’ve shown the resulting image and the painting on its way, I’ve been asked several times:  “where did you get this idea?”  I answer, I don’t know, it just came to me.  So, where do we get ideas?  We get inspiration, notions, nigglings, aha’s – but from where? Being the good search geek that I am, I went online last night and put the question “where do ideas come from?” into Google. What came out was a “playlist” of TED talks centered on just that question. Then I listened to them as I worked on the painting.  I heard some interesting thoughts on ideas and creativity.  These are the three talks I found the most compelling:

Steven Johnson talked about how the first coffee house in Oxford, England was the beginning of the Enlightenment – as before that people drank alcohol all day and were too drunk to think! He says it’s the free sharing of thoughts among groups of people that spawns great ideas. His talk also has a fun story about how the world got GPS technology.

Elizabeth Gilbert shared how she’s faced with the fact that her greatest work may very well be behind her in having written a mega-bestseller “Eat Pray Love” and how in ancient times creativity was attributed to daemons and muses, freeing us from the responsibility (and credit) for our success or failure – it’s not up to each of us – yay!

Matt Ridley’s really upbeat talk is about how diversification and specialization is an integral part of human evolution and how ideas come along because we communicate and cooperate and each do what we are best at.  If we aren’t consumed with doing everything necessary to survive, we can live easier and better lives. Love this!

What I heard had me see that the idea for this painting came about as a progression:

• It started with doing an exercise in color mixing many years ago. I saw how the relative lightness of the yellow squares created a pattern which gave me the idea that I might want to do something intentional with that at some point.
• Then two years ago when a couple of the painters in my group did this same color exercise, I saw how much fun they were having and remembered this idea. I decided to paint an image – our neighbors’ crab apple tree – one square at a time. Interesting! And a great way to experience that everything is abstract – we paint what we see, shape by shape.
• After this, I went looking for a filter that was more interesting than a grid of squares. I love maps and I love Paris, so why not paint this Parisian flower stall through the map of Paris?
• Which then had me searching through photos for others of Paris that I might paint. I landed on the picture of me and the clock. Pulled out of a scrap book, it was propped up on my desk for more than a year before the idea came to put Paris Roses behind it.
• And I have the beginnings of the next painting – one of me taken at the end of my Paris half-year, painted through the “filter” of the rose window in Saint Chappelle in Paris. I’m a bit shy about it – it seems somewhat self-absorbed. But I’m hardly the first artist to paint herself!

I know that being alive at this point in history and the support of my husband, my mom and millions of others doing what they do frees me to be creative – and that this idea came as a progression and as a product of interaction with the world and with other artists, and being in a safe environment.  But, I also subscribe to what Elizabeth Gilbert shared – which Stephen Pressfield also writes about towards the end of his kick-ass book “The War of Art” – there are unseen forces from the etheric world that feed us creative ideas.

Where we come in is twofold:  we must be available for these ideas to reach us – even intentionally put ourselves in the situations where we best receive them – which for me is often on my morning walks with Bo.  And then we must do something with them – which most likely will mean honing the craft, the skills to be able to use them.  Plus, if we are the channels, the vessels to make manifest these ideas, it takes us actually doing something! There we go, the masculine and the feminine – married again.

And it takes believing that each of us is a creative being, if your heart beats and you are breathing, you have the potential for ideas to come through you.

With my love,

Cara