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The Introduction
Welcome back, friend. We have learned a few things on our latest adventure, and finally, the time has come to begin a new one. What places are we going to explore this time? The mountains, the ocean, and a museum. But more importantly, what is the question we will be looking for the answer to on our journey?
How do we get inspired by others’ work without copying it?
As always, we will have to dig a little deeper, or get up to the next level - whichever metaphor you find more precise, to find the answer. Are you ready for another adventure with only the unknown on the other side?
As far as I can remember, I have always been creating, assembling, composing, experimenting, and inventing all sorts of things. I have also tried different art forms as means of self-expression. The first one was writing. Next came painting. Then, music. The current one is photography. Interestingly, going back to my past works and analyzing them, it is obvious to me that whichever instrument I chose, the ideas I was trying to convey stayed the same.
However, one more thing persisted throughout the years. It is not being able to distinguish between inspiration and imitation. Can my work be called unique if it resembles the work of another artist? What if it looks completely different on the surface but has a similar underlying idea?
First, there was only escaping the issue. I would think I had no choice but to put myself into a creative vacuum devoid of any influence, whether from the same genre or unrelated ones, to create something unique. That might work out as a science experiment, but it is not viable as a creative strategy. Whether I want it or not, the things I experience influence me. Most of the time, I do not even get to choose what those things are.
In that case, what if I did my best to stay original inside my genre while letting inspiration flow in from different ones? And if a particular piece sticks in my mind for longer than I would like to, I could purposely avoid creating anything similar to it. Would that be enough to come up with unique and novel art?
This way of organizing my creative process lasted for a while until I started asking more questions. Where is the boundary between genres of art? What if there is a piece spread across multiple genres? Will purposefully avoiding influence not eventually put me in a corner where I have no space to be creative? And if my only pursuit is trying not to sound like somebody else, does it not leave my artistry out of the equation?
After acknowledging these issues, all that was left was the uncertainty of not knowing whether I had a creative spark in me in the first place and the fear of never being able to ignite something with it. It is even worse than not having any ideas at all - the moment you get what you think is a blink of inspiration, it gets rejected by your inner overseer as possibly being an imitation of somebody else’s work. The further you walk down this valley, the more strangled you become by the overseer’s shackles.
It seems we found ourselves in a rather dire situation. Is this the death of an artist? Before jumping to conclusions, let us try to look for a creative solution to this problem.
