Art Inspiration

My friend, Jane, came to visit this week, with paint gear and sketch book as always. She is a great example to me of paying attention to the ordinary everyday scenes of beauty around us. She was the first one, years ago, who pointed out to me that art is about ordinary events.  She said, "Look at this famous painting: a little girl, sitting in a chair, with a handkerchief in her lap.  How ordinary is that?"  Jane showed me that great art is often not about the profound or miraculous, but about the common, the usual, even in the people around us.

 Though my tools as a writer are different from hers as an artist, we both enjoy looking for the moments of the day to capture with words, camera, or on canvas.  She is developing her skills as a plein-air painter - an artist who paints outdoors, capturing light and shadows, and being able to work quickly to capture a scene. The word comes from the French Impressionists style.  That is also what I attempt to distill into words: the impression of a scene or an event or a character.  She talks about composition, meaning to arrange the parts of a scene to create a unified, harmonious whole.  Not that much different from the compositions I write to form a picture in the reader's mind with words.

We talked and shared thoughts and inspiration and goals and motivation and where we are each headed with our skills, what we plan and hope to accomplish through our work. We spent a pleasant afternoon inspiring each other.

another one of Jane's paintings 

Her website and blog is  www.janethorpeart.com, if you want to peek at some more of her work.