Some weeks, the well runs dry. You want to write, draw, cook something new, rearrange a room, anything, and nothing comes. Scrolling for inspiration only makes it worse: everyone else seems to be creating effortlessly.
Try a different kind of spark. These four paintings were made by artists who broke the rules of their time, and they still carry that energy.
Henri Matisse, Dance (1909–10, State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg)
Five figures dance in a ring on a green hill under a blue sky. Three colors, a few lines, and an enormous sense of joy and movement. Matisse stripped painting down to almost nothing, and the result feels freer than anything around it. Look at the gap between two hands that almost touch: the whole circle depends on it.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VIII (1923, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York)
Circles, lines, triangles and color float and collide across the canvas. Kandinsky often compared painting to music, and this work feels like an orchestra tuning up into a symphony. Try "listening" to it: which shape is the loudest? Which is the quietest note?
Hilma af Klint, The Ten Largest (1907, Hilma af Klint Foundation, Stockholm)
Ten enormous paintings of flowing shapes, spirals and soft pinks, blues and oranges, meant to show the stages of human life, from childhood to old age. Af Klint painted abstract works years before abstraction became famous, and she asked that they not be shown until twenty years after her death. They were made for a future that had not arrived yet.
Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889, Museum of Modern Art, New York)
Painted from his room at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, the view from his window, with a village he added from imagination. The sky swirls, the stars blaze, the cypress reaches up like a flame. Van Gogh made one of the most beloved paintings in the world during one of the hardest periods of his life.
Turn looking into making
Choose one painting and look at it for five minutes. Then take a pencil and make something small in response: three lines inspired by the shapes, a list of the colors, a short poem, a sketch of the gesture you loved. Don't aim for good. Aim for started. Inspiration often arrives after the first mark, not before it.
More sparks every month
The Digital subscription is made to keep your creative well full: recommendations on art, opera, ballet, music, books and places, at least one video each month, photo stories, practices to try, and the digital edition of "(meditating) On Art". Small sparks, delivered regularly.
Remember to take as much time as you need, and meet me at the next one.
Love, Evi