Move around, observe the world, draw on the bus, find your space … and don’t try too hard. Great artists describe how we can find inspiration every day
It doesn’t matter if you can’t draw
Creating art isn’t just a pastime, it is a way of living. But how can you nurture a more artistic existence? Artists share their advice on how to be more creative.
Helen Cammock was one of the winners of the Turner prize in 2019 and says she didn’t have artistic tendencies as a child, despite being the daughter of an art teacher. “Just because you can’t draw something in a representative, representational way, it doesn’t mean that you’re not creative,” she says. Cammock, who lives in north Wales, works across “film, photography, print, performance, writing and text”. She is hopeful that art lessons at school have changed to be less focused on representational drawing and painting.
Conclusion
Learn about the history of art
“The thing with artists is they absorb other artists,” says Ryan. “So if you are looking back to, say, Cézanne and El Greco, you become part of that timeline and it is part of your story. I tell students to look back and create a family, whether it’s something from the 1700s or whenever. It narrows your world in a good way. You start seeing cultures and ideas through the ages very differently, because you start placing yourself there.” Your style may be reminiscent of what has come before it. For a while Ganjei made work with the text “Not David Shrigley”. “It is quite hard to know when you’ve been influenced by something or when it’s your original idea,” Ganjei says, “because if you’ve found something that simple, it almost always existed.”
Be creative without realising
“The thing with artists is they absorb other artists,” says Ryan. “So if you are looking back to, say, Cézanne and El Greco, you become part of that timeline and it is part of your story. I tell students to look back and create a family, whether it’s something from the 1700s or whenever. It narrows your world in a good way. You start seeing cultures and ideas through the ages very differently, because you start placing yourself there.” Your style may be reminiscent of what has come before it. For a while Ganjei made work with the text “Not David Shrigley”. “It is quite hard to know when you’ve been influenced by something or when it’s your original idea,” Ganjei says, “because if you’ve found something that simple, it almost always existed.”
