Art & Inspiration

Los Angeles has many fantastic museums. I’ve been to several of them but had never made it to LACMA until this trip. It was a lot of fun, with an excellent collection. What surprised me most was the energetic feeling of inspiration that I hadn’t felt since I was a photographer.

That’s because I had stopped looking at the work within my own personal context. I stopped searching for common ground. No connection means no inspiration, and I believe that’s the secret to connecting with art. Most of us look at art outside our personal context. As foreign objects. We’re disconnected, and we’re poorer for it.

Most people don’t work in industries traditionally labeled as “creative”, so they either struggle to find this personal context or don’t think to look for it in the first place.

But there’s plenty to engage with, in an artist’s work: their personal struggle to establish their own voice or identity. Attempts to understand themselves in the context of their peers, our society, and our world. Social commentaries. Explorations and experiments.

These are universal pursuits. We all endeavor to answer the same questions, but artists record theirs in artifacts. The next time you’re viewing a piece of art, I encourage you to find common ground with it.

Updated January 27th, 2017