A new art idea has kinship with an unpaid balance. Your idea-account may have existed for a very long time, but as the unpaid part derives from charges after the most recent zero balance, new art ideas are figuratively undelivered-fruit-of-inspiration. It’s a debt you owe your society. The inspiration is intrusted to you and until you create the art, it’s unrealized or unpaid. The price of inspiration is that you positively act on it.

There are layers of proceedure all connected to create the painting. (it could be a drawing, a sculpture, a song, or a story). They are all built on the bit of inspiration that seeds them individually. In that respect, they’re new. We don’t know the source of the inspiration, but for the sake of common sense, we call that the origin of the art.

Subsequent treatment of the idea involves targeted activities that I call layers. There’s a research layer, a development layer, an ‘add more inspiration’ layer, and others. Even in the final creation of the work, there can be layer built on layer.

For reasons unknown, initial inspiration is followed by maintenance inspiration. When this peters out, the smart course is to put the art aside for as long as it takes until it renews. This can take years. When it does, all mysteries concerning the resolution of problems in the piece dissolve, replaced by clear headed certainties about how to procede.

An example of a layer is this cartoon I created for the Lotus Europa website. The concept changed over time. I made up the image in photoshop to this point. The initial concept was a response to 4 X 4 rigs with a bumper sticker that exclaims that “contents may shift during transport”. This could be as easily true for the off road truck as for  a spirited drive in a roadster.

After I colorized and finished the work, I tried it with several captions. Ultimately I abandoned them for this, which was a different message altogether.

Each time I advanced the cartoon was a new layer of it’s evolution.

It’s almost like the old poem:

“Our actions still pursue us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are”