Sources of Inspiration 3

This week I’ve been sitting in a classroom learning the finer points of programming ArcObjects in VBA. For those who don’t know exactly what this is, count yourselves among the thankful. For those who do know exactly what I’m talking about, please send kind sympathies in my general direction. But regardless of this cruel learning experience that will ultimately make my job that much harder, I thought about a few concepts or foci for you to think about in regards to generating your artwork.

The first is the merging of the modern world and the world of high fantasy. While sitting in PetSmart the other day looking up and down the rows of dog food it occurred to me that were their dragons, of a reasonable size, in our everyday lives, surely PetSmart would support that pet like any other. There would be brands of DragonFood and rows of it to match those for the dog. I couldn’t help but think of a dog owner looking fearfully down the aisle at a dragon owner who wasn’t paying much attention. The dragon, perhaps the size of a German Shepherd would be smoking at the nostrils in preparation to roast the poor yapping poodle.

This among other ideas began to cross my mind. A Centaur World Wrestling Federation (I know it’s WWE now) wrestler leaping over the top rope to severely body slam some popular human favorite. A hoarde of Goblins cleaning litter off the side of the road as a chain gang. A mermaid scuba instructor. Or pair up your own modern day mundane activity with some element of High Fantasy. This kind of artwork is probably best illustrated by looking for almost any Robert Aspirin book in his MYTH series. The cover artist is Walter Velez.

The second group of ideas that crossed my mind in thinking about potential sources for artistic inspiration is one that I’ve mentioned in this forum before: Zen. While the mysterious “one hand clapping” types of Zen statements may not bring much to mind in the way of artwork, other more real world friendly analogies do. Just the artist Basho supplies us with several instances of wonderful imagery for a simple little piece of art such as “Old Pond / frog jumps in / Splash!”.

To a good search of zen sayings and reading through them to search for imagery you only have to go as far as your web browser. Type “Zen sayings” or “Zen haiku” in the search engine and fire it up. You are sure to get back a large number of web sites, many of which will contain sayings that you may find uniquely inspiring.

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