Mapping the Creative Moment: The Spark of Inspiration for Six Artists

There is a significant back story to any exhibition that cannot be taken for granted – just how an artist arrives at the finished work. It is perhaps a mysterious process, even unknowable – a black box, if you will. Initially, the artist may feel their way along until something clicks. It may not always be a lucid “eureka” moment, but more commonly described as something that “works.” 

For your consideration here are six artists with diverse studio practices, that over the course of their careers have perfected their craft respectively to an end that works for them individually. Though the act of “inspiration” itself may lie beyond the reach of any analysis, yet a mapping of the roots of an artist’s working method might provide a helpful key to unlocking, if only a few salient elements within the creative “black box of art.”

To Anne Marchand, “Creativity is the language of the artist.”  That’s how vision is communicated to a wider public. New things are created in the realms of the imagination. Elements of the world combine to create the object of beauty. The artist has cast her eyes on the very ends of the visible universe through a meditation on images transmitted by the Hubble telescope. An exchange of energy takes place between cosmos and humanity. We live and we create. As the pours of Marchand’s color congeal on canvas, art fuses with life. 

Having solved the problem of formally and faithfully capturing in form and color what we experience, it hence becomes a public record of sorts. The artist, in many ways, serves as its eyewitness reporter. The paintings of Steve Simpson, in the precision of their execution, convey a truthfulness in the way that we think of a photograph as being truthful. Yet, they depict an inner world of the psyche beyond the reach of any camera lens. His 2020 Primordial Soup, for instance, seems to be a snapshot of both an individual organism and the whole sequence of life at once. Through its painted forms the viewer may traverse the impossible distances between inner and outer space.

We may ask, “Are there invisible levels to the physical setting in which we find ourselves?” Nolan Preece is an explorer and guide into unknown worlds. His “photographs” are proof of the existence of these realms into which he alone holds the key through his unique working process. The journey from Preece’s earlier chemigram prints The Veiled Landscape: Curtains to the 2017 Riparian Notes, for instance, present an unveiling of a deeper truth under the skin of what we normally see. The artist/photographer, in his transmutation of the visual, has assumed the garb of a modern-day alchemist.

The passing parade of of life may be viewed as a series of dramatic cinematic moments. In his 2023 solo exhibition at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, Eric Sanders succeeds in “freeze-framing” gesture and image, a technique photographer Eadweard Muybridge developed over a hundred years ago. In the case of Sanders, Blinding Lights is a charcoal rendering of a falling woman mashed with splashes of black and yellow acrylic on canvas. The stopwatch moment is made eternal as if fossilized. The artist introduces a curious paradox: the finer the slice of time recorded, the nearer the painting’s reflection of the infinite.

There is a necessary exchange that must also occur between artist and the viewing public. Dellamarie Parrilli creates a space in the very expressive gesture itself where artist and viewer meet. Parrilli’s added dimensionality has sufficient breadth to compress and unpack the spiritual, emotional, and psychological, aspects that humanity shares. Her creative output is a physical record of actions that transcend constraints of time, culture, and language. 

Precisely where in the geography of the cosmos artists finds themselves situated cannot be underestimated. The timeworn remoteness of John Kingerlee’s home on the Beara Peninsula in West Cork, Ireland has provided the artist inspiration without limit, the transit of the sun glistening over the unspoilt vistas of mountain and sea. Neither abstract nor figurative, Kingerlee sees himself simply as “a maker of surfaces that are articulated using a language of lines, colors, and textures.” Furthermore, the magpie instinct to collect almost anything: receipts, clippings, photos, and sundry found material, may serve as time capsules to seal a moment out of the flotsam of life’s ephemera.

If Ann Marchand taps into the broad cosmic bandwidth, Steve Simpson tracks a zooming in and out of it simultaneously. Both artists, however, are involved with an exchange between universe and self – a living dialogue that is made public through its exhibition. The drama associated with the sum of the actions required to realize a work of art is forcefully executed in paint by Dellamarie Parrilli through her uniquely forged dimensionality. 

Similarly, to Parrilli, life visualized as a series of strokes and gestures can equally be applied to the Tokyo exhibition of recent work by Eric Sanders. Sanders freeze-frames a split-second moment to immortalize it, while the work of John Kingerlee speaks from a specific geographical location to capture a sense of ephemera. Nolan Preece explodes the conventions of what we see through chemistry. His “chemigram” prints reveal fantastic environments that that may be a glimpse into a multiverse. In that respect, the artists featured in this exhibition have “mapped the creative moment” from six distinct places in the visible universe and beyond.  

Steve Rockwell is the publisher and editor of dArt International magazine. First released in Los Angeles in 1998, dArt also covers contemporary art in New York, Toronto, San Antonio, and Richmond, Virginia. dArt was itself the product of a 1995 narrative performance art piece entitled Meditations on Space, which involved 175 art galleries through Europe and North America. Steve Rockwell’s Color Match tournaments have become global.