When Inspiration Hits

Spread the love

Inspiration can come any time from anywhere, and when it hits, one really should do something with it.

Wellington is an exciting city full of wonderful things to do and see (my blog post about ‘My Wellington Experience’ is testament to that). So when an opportunity to head down there came up, I certainly wasn’t about to say no.

Even in winter, Wellington weather can be somewhat surprising. Believing I was heading into a stormy couple of days still didn’t faze me as I boarded the plane in a sun-drenched Tauranga.

No wind. That’s right. Flying into Wellington was a breeze, literally.

It was mid-afternoon, and my son was right on time to meet me. As time with him was limited to that single evening, there was only one thing I wanted to do, go to Te Papa and see the Surrealists exhibition. I have always loved this style of art with my heroes of Breton, Dali, Ernst and Cheval, so to go and see their works was an absolute must.

I was not disappointed!

There were paintings, sculptures, magazines, sketches and all manner of other creative endeavours the Dada and Surrealists came up with. Their sense of weirdness and humour is out of the box. With their use of brushes and pens, they created art in many forms.

For example. Here is something even you can do.

Take a small article from a newspaper and cut out every word. Then put all the words into a paper bag, shake gently. Now take out one word at a time and copy each word exactly as they come from the bag.

And there you have it – an original poem by you.

This is a Dadaist Poem by Tristan Tzara

But the most fun was being able to recreate the mirror in the painting “Portrait of Edward James”, which shows the back of the man’s head in the mirror… below.

Into a wee room I went, stood in front of the mirror and what I saw was exactly that – the back of my head. Freaky, to say the least, but also incredibly inventive. I’m not sure how it’s done, but there was a mirror behind me, so I’m assuming it had to be all about the angles (and I’m no mathematician).

A frame surrounded a peephole, and my son took the photo below. What a great memento of a great day.

Walking around this exhibition and seeing the art made me want to get pen and ink and sketch or write poetry. This is the thing with inspiration; one has to make the step to follow through immediately and so when I got back to my hotel room that night, out came the pen and ideas were transferred onto paper to be worked on at a later date.

Let’s trust that “later date” is sooner rather than… well, later