The great thing about working in the visual arts is how everything you experience has the potential to feed your work. Not because of the direct impact of the experience, but because you can learn so much about yourself based on how you interpret your world.
I just finished the beautiful novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I was reading it purely for pleasure, and didn't expect to learn anything about my work. Instead I found tons of imagery that sparked my brain, and lots of uses of mirrors as metaphor. Near the end of the novel, when one character finds himself homesick for the town he's just left (because living there made him two homesick for another town), his emotion is described as two nostalgias facing each other like mirrors. Wow. If I can paint that sentence, I can die happy.
I also recently attended an artist lecture by a new visiting professor at my university, Ariel Baron-Robbins. Her work looks drastically different than mine-- for one thing, it's nonobjective. I was delighted to discover that her work actually begins as observational drawings made in her sketchbook, then processed and edited into monumental drawings. That's not really so different than how I've been working lately-- manipulating representational images into strange realities.
Also, during her lecture I was struck with the epiphany that I need to send my gypsy dancer painting through the circular saw and put it back together "wrong".
Moral: get out there. Learn something!
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