What inspires me?

Amanda Winograd

Film I

Spring 2009

What Inspires Me?

Honestly this is always a difficult question for me to answer because I suppose what inspires me is what I find beautiful, and that encompasses quite a lot of things that don’t necessarily relate to each other or even find a presence in my work. For example, love means just about everything to me but I rarely use it as a source for making art. Maybe that is because most of the art I have made so far has been the result of an assignment, and the sort of inspiration that has gone into making some of the greatest art in the world does not apply; I just have to be able to hand something in the next week, inspired or not. However, I think I can definitely say that I may hypothetically be inspired by music, patterns, the beach, American pop culture, folk art, function, and as previously mentioned, love. I think that being an art history major has benefitted me in that constantly being shown images of paintings or whatnot has allowed me to kind of figure out what I think works visually and what doesn’t. I find, for example, Edouard Vuillard’s paintings so interesting because his use of pattern is so striking to me and ahead of its time that I look for pattern now in everything I see. The same thing happens when I look at Mexican pottery or waves at the beach; I want to figure out why I am so attracted to those things and capture it somehow. So really I guess the imitation of beauty is what inspires me to make art, and the things I mentioned before have been the things so far that I have most wanted to capture the beauty of.