Inspiration Comes From?

~~ Naturally Inspried to Create from a Settled Soul:

Genuine inspiration is not particularly dramatic. It's very ordinary. It comes from settling down in your environment and accepting situations as natural. Out of that you begin to realize that you can dance with them. So inspiration comes from acceptance rather than from having a sudden flash of a good gimmick coming up in your mind. Natural inspiration is simply having something somewhere that you can relate with, so it has a sense of stableness and solidity. Inspiration has two parts: openness and clear vision, or in Sanskrit, shunyata and prajna. Both are based on the notion of original mind, traditionally known as buddha mind, which is blank, nonterritorial, noncompetitive, and open.

From Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche "One Stroke" in DHARMA ART, page 100



This was quoted (perhaps edited a bit first?) on a favorite- fellow blog of mine:
Link to: http://beingknowingdoing.blogspot.com/

Whereas a conventional artist starts painting a canvas
knowing what she wants to paint, and
holds to her original intention until the work is finished,
an original artist with equal technical training commences with a deeply felt but undefined goal in mind,
shapes emerging on the canvas, and ends up with a finished work
that probably will not resemble anything she started out with.
If the artist is responsive to her inner feelings, knows what she likes and
does not like, and pays attention to what is happening on the canvas,
a good painting is bound to emerge. On the other hand,
if she holds on to a preconceived notion of what
the painting should look like, without responding to the possibilities suggested
by the forms developing before her, the painting is likely to be trite.

MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI:
__Flow, The Psychology of Optimal Experience--