- The presence or absence of contentment?
- Personal situations or social conditions?
- Interactions with humans or non-humans?
- Rest or fatigue?
- Sobriety or being high?
- Joy or sorrow?
- Culture or nature?
- Familiarity or mystery?
- Production or consumption?
- The past or the present?
- Facts or feelings?
- Anger or pity?
- Yourself or others?
The presence of contentment, personal situations, humans, rest, sobriety, sorrow, culture, familiarity, consumption, past, feelings, pity, others. Five of these I'll discuss a little more in-depth.
Personal situations:
I'm much more inspired by personal situations due to the fact that I'm much more emotionally impacted by intimate details about another person or people. On that level, I can work by myself, observe and relate to these details and use similarities within myself to react/respond. I connect to people directly and deliberately, even if it is a fragile connection. I deal much better with subtleties than I do with overt or generalized conditions of society as a whole. This may be influenced by the way I handle myself in social spaces. I am reserved and attach myself to one or two people I'm with and don't seek out the opportunity to "work the room". It may seem a stretch to connect how I interact socially with my artistic inspiration, but I think my temperament when approaching both issues is similar. I've often secretly thought of my artwork--or at least the artwork that really comes from me--as being quiet. I prefer it that way, and I don't really feel comfortable with it any other way.
Humans:
I am inspired primarily by humans vs nonhumans. The way the question is worded, it seems like either option is at least a sentient being, but I'll take it as humans vs the rest of the world, including inanimate objects like a chair or something. I'm inspired by other people, probably again because of my personality. I'll forever be an observer--one who will try to understand and empathize with others. Humans are so full of wonderful and tragic stories that I can't resist putting myself in their places. For example, right now I'm in a cafe and from my table I saw a man I thought looked exactly like an acquaintance from high school. Almost uncanny. I played all the memories of Ryan I had in my head, but then the man turned. In profile he was Ryan, a connection, but when confronted with the straight view of his face, the spell was broken. This stranger had intruded in my memories and made me connect my personal stories with him. I hadn't run into him at the airport and ended up on the same connector flight to Chicago. He wasn't a friendly face in an unfriendly world. But even so, we looked at each other longer than even I expected, so maybe I was a potential friend too. Maybe I could've been his airplane acquaintance long ago. I think it is this potential that interests me most of all--the potential in humans to connect to each other, sometimes in unexpected ways.
Sorrow:
I prefer experiencing joy, but sorrow is what inspires me more out of the two. I can't explain it without sounding morose, but I think sorrow has an apparent depth in how it affects people. For example, I have had a lot of joy throughout my life, and that certainly adds up, but it also becomes more normalized than periods of sorrow, at least for the most part in my case. I'm lucky. Because these joy events become normalized and are seen as a part of my modern American life, the sorrow events stand out much more than joy, except for maybe in extreme cases. My mom always asks me why I don't recall all the happy or fun things she did for my sister and I as kids. I remember some of course, but I don't remember her taking us out of school early to head to the lake on some days. It's not that I didn't experience joy when going to the lake, but I just don't remember it. I do remember my mom one day goading me to play on a piece of playground equipment, off of which I promptly fell into a mud puddle. To a self-conscious seven-year-old, that was pretty traumatic. I also remember much later, lying on my parents' couch in the fetal position after my first heartbreak, feeling too numb to move. When I see sorrow in the world, I feel an empathy toward whoever is ailing. I don't pretend to have a sorrowful life, or a life that is harder than others, but I feel an empathy. I connect and interpret the world better in this way, and like I said before, I prefer to turn the scope down to the personal level and operate this way.
Familiarity:
Along this vein, I am inspired by familiarity, because it is the facilitating force in how I interact with the world. I use what I know--my memories and thought patterns--to figure out the world. I'm very interested in how these connections are formed between my interior world and the exterior world around me. I also want to be familiar to others, to connect. It's not that easy to do, at least for me, despite my efforts. Mystery is interesting too, but there aren't a whole lot of things that I can't familiarize in my mind, at least on a partial level.
Others:
Finally, I chose others vs myself. I am perpetually uninteresting to myself, except for the ways I connect to others. I am a die-hard introvert, but I am contemplating how others relate and how we relate together rather than just drawing inspiration purely from myself. That's really the only way I can find words to explain it.
