I was walking along the other day and I was overcome with a strong emotion and an image to go with it. (I usually don't get my image ideas that way.) I don't know what made me "see" this image or what triggered the emotion. It may have been something as obscure as the angle of the sun. The image was quite clear in my mind, though, and still is.
I experimented with the image for a while ... sketching it and trying to understand how I wanted to draw it. Then, when my computer was on the blink for a few days, I got all my photographs organized. That was amazing by itself ... but even more amazing was that I found an image in those photos that matched my mental image very closely. It was four years old and I had forgotten all about it. Or so I thought.
I use my camera a lot for my art. I consider it my sketch book and my note book. I take lots of reference photos ... so many that I can't remember them all consciously. So I wonder if we really do store images deep in our minds ... until we use them or need them. In my case, did I keep that image in an internal photo file that I could only access through my subconscious? Did the image come forward when I needed to express this emotion?
Here is another thought. The image that bloomed in my brain that day is still very strong and, although I have found a reference photo that expresses it very well, there is still more to say. It feels like it has enough energy to inspire more than one drawing. I can think of many ways to express it. The expressions of it will be different, but the main image/emotion will stay the same ... or maybe that will evolve too. I will think of it as a seed image that is generating many different versions of itself.
If it is like a seed ... then I will let it keep growing in different ways and harvesting its fruit. Perhaps this "seed image" was from my deep subconscious and it was waiting for a time to express itself.
In any case, art is deep and wide and alive and I wish you the joy of it ...
