Dark Inspiration

It’s not been a great couple of weeks to watch the news. Let’s be honest: it rarely is. But this last month seems to have been particularly bad. There have been some awful events in China, Boston, Pakistan and Texas which have dominated broadcasts around the world. Some truly harrowing stories have come out of these events as well as some acts of heroic courage.

My question this week is this: is it acceptable for artists of any form to use this suffering as inspiration or background material for our art? Is it right for any of us to take on board the information we’ve seen and use it in our later work?

All creative types draw upon their own life experiences in their work whether consciously or not, overtly or (much more likely) just as vague creative stimulation. It’s much easier to write, sculpt, paint (or whatever your particular artistic medium may be) something that’s vaguely like an event or object that we’ve seen or experienced in some way than it is to try to conjure a scenario and its entire associated range of emotions out of thin air. So if I were writing a love story I might remember how I feel about my own Beloved. If someone was to paint a field of poppies then there would be no better way to get the sight, smells and all the other senses fixed in their mind than to go to a poppy field and experience one for themselves. And if we were to create an artwork based on less pleasant subject matter the same thing stands. We have to experience, even if via a television screen, that uncomfortable situation to some degree. Thomas Harris doesn’t need to be a murderer to write about Hannibal Lecter but he does have to find some way inside his fictional killer’s head. He, I and all creative types need to have an understanding of what we’re creating, however far from the pleasant lives that we’d wish for ourselves that may be. We use what we see to make our work more believable.

The other way of looking at this of course is that we have to create. I need to write. Painters need to paint. It’s part of our make-up. Whether others appreciate our work or not is, to some degree, irrelevant. We’d do it even if we were the last people on earth. And we don’t just invent situations; we make lasting archives of the world around us. Artists record what they see.

With that in mind it would be foolish to think that events like those we’ve seen over the last few weeks would not, in some way, influence our work. 

Sometimes we take our inspiration from dark places.