A lot of people ask me, where does your inspiration come from, well, the short answer is everywhere. Here is just one example. Driving up and down the motorway to and from my art centre, I kept driving past a wall in various states of being dismantled. Yes, a wall. I needed to get in and photograph it before it was taken down altogether and lost forever. Finally one day I had the time, my camera and my boots on, so I pulled over and started exploring the wall. Being a visual person I find it a big challenge to talk, or write, about the things I see and what it does to my imagination! “ I just like it”….ok, I can hear my English teacher, “could do better”.
From first glance, it doesn’t look like much, but sometimes you have to get up close to uncover the detail…the treasure. Had I not gone and explored The Wall, I would have missed all that texture, I guess those marks have been created over a period of time from lots of different sources. That is something we can’t copy or reproduce. The colours were fascinating, I loved the bold colours sitting together, who said red & green should never be seen, hmph, I beg to differ. And those rust colours! I enjoy the composition of shapes, splashes of paint, type and texture. Somehow they all work together even though that, perhaps, they were not intended to live side by side.
Then there’s the typography, in any of my adventures, I think that it’s the gems of type that I love discovering the most. Whether it’s spray paint, shapes that happen to look like type or forgotten about objects.
So now what, you have taken the photos, had a play in photoshop. Can you extend on these images, what are the possibilities, what can we ‘’do’’ with them? I have used these images for backgrounds, signage, book covers and, my most favourite, to upcycle a coffee table. I still use these images as a Source of Inspiration and always find something new when drooling over them.