What's Inspiration?

Interesting question Anna. I believe if you trace back your exposure to paintings and nature from childhood you will find the continuous influences of each being worked on within the mysterious and seemingly limitless place of the brain called creativity, that one day, after years of gestation, comes to mind as an image, and you are ready to create it outside of yourself.
My first falling in love with art occurred in seeing a painting of Odilon Redon at the major museum in the city I grew up in. It was a special exhibit of modern masters, but I wasn't ready to see them.then that one painting just stopped me, like running into a close friend in a very unexpected way. It was one of his larger vase with flowers paintings, and there was a red flower that stood out.
Years of flower gardening, then more time went by, and that experience lay buried in my mind, until one day after putting some real attention to the work of certain modern masters,in a spontaneous way this pastel revision of another underneath just happened. That red flower of Redon probably decided it was time to come out of my visual storehouse and make itself visible.

I loved Monet's waterlilies since a child. I was given a large print for Christmas when nine. It was by my bed and I always looked at it. Years later I lived close to a pond with lilies and koi, and visited daily, observing, seeing too much to translate to a two dimensional surface.
Then I was in NYC while an exhibit of the original enormous Monet waterlilies was on at the MOMA and went several times a week (artist pass free) to sit and over time begin to see his almost chaotic layering of color and brush work, so like the chaos I experienced with the actual pond.
Then, from years of taking in and gestating, this painting unplanned, just happened.

I alwas loved childhood books with pictures, I rarely read the words, but wanted to put my own story to the pictures. It would be interesting to hear everyone's inspiration.

I started to draw in color pencils at a very early age, and I think my very first attempts were variations of what my mother taught me - a girl was a a circle on top of a triangle with two sticks underneath, etc. I also painted in watercolors, and true, I must have been inspired by pictures in children's books.

At eight or nine, or later, the rare visits to our national art gallery vere a huge source of inspiration I do not remember which paintings these were, I only remember the urge to paint, paint...

As a child, for many years I looked at a framed piece of cross-stitch embroidery done by my grandmother. For me, the floral motif contained a variety of illusions, a sequence of images blending one into another, nothing to do with the actual flowers. Incidentally, I am now working at a painting intended to reproduce that imagery - some forty years later...

I am enthralled by this ongoing conversation regarding the development of creativity in childhood but never discussed for me was the gestation period that allows our own interpretation of the world we see and feel as well as absorbing the art we see. Just a layer I had ignored.

Keep this going.. Art was not a part of my education and all has been done by doing what Chana did, simply sit and study... get reasonably close, read colors... go back and look again at what was achieved with the colors and temperature of the colors.

LINE is my inspiration and what moves me most. First REAL art memory: sitting in church with paper and pencil from my mom to keep us occupied and QUIET! lol I was drawing a dress bottom and did one line like a candy cane to denote the fold billow of it. My mom was shocked it was that easy. That's why I love buildings and drawing and abstract painting with colors. LINES. That includes the invisible line that separates one color from another in a STRONG painting. Stella, Martin, Motherwe ll, Twomby, Rockwell Kent, Monets water ripples in The Boating Party, Serra's steel, etc