Your inspiration for making your art matters to people. They want to understand where your art came from. You don’t have to come right out and say it, but you can hint at it and lead people down the path that you want them to follow and let them discover it for themselves.

Filling the well involves the active pursuit of images to refresh our artistic reservoirs. Art is born in attention. Its midwife is detail. Art may seem to spring from pain, but perhaps that is because pain serves to focus our attention onto details (for instance, the excruciatingly beautiful curve of a lost lover’s neck). Art may seem to involve b

“The process of making art,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity.”[2]

Creative people understand that inspiration can come from almost anywhere, so the more content you consume, the more interests you cultivate, and the more things you learn, the more likely you will find a new idea. You must be someone willing to immerse yourself in a large and wide variety of content, not limiting yourself to your field or your per

Collecting the dots. Then connecting them. And then sharing the connections with those around you. This is how a creative human works. Collecting, connecting, sharing.

“Dumpster diving” is one of the jobs of the artist—finding the treasure in other people’s trash, sifting through the debris of our culture, paying attention to the stuff that everyone else is ignoring, and taking inspiration from the stuff that people have tossed aside for whatever reasons.