创作与灵感 What is Artistic Inspiration?

灵感存在于一切艺术创造中，书法亦然。
许多书法学习者，苦练书法多年，觉得没有进步和突破，直到在一个偶然机遇，令他‘悟’出了要突破的那一点，从此书艺大进，达到了一个新的境界。传说唐代大书法家张旭就是看了公孙大娘的舞剑器才悟出了写好书法的道理。

西方为了给艺术灵感下定义而争论不休，看下面英文的叙述就知道了。这是他们的可爱处。可中国人从来不给灵感下定义，盖言不尽意也。

灵感是需要寻找和追求的。许多人看到书法精品，可是没有感触，不能从中领悟出什么东西。为什么呢？因为他没有去追求。灵感有法可寻吗？这是个大问题。我们的老祖宗也没有明确的告诉我们。就从古人的诗歌中寻找吧：

众里寻他千百度，蓦然回首，那人却在，灯火阑珊处。

In the crowd for a thousand times, I failed to look for my love. Suddenly she turned her head and appeared in the corner, where lights were sparse and somber.

明白了，学书法不但要有追求，而且要‘寻他千百度’，蜻蜓点水式的学习是不行的。寻找是每一个学书法的人必须走的路程，走够千万里，路途由生而熟，所谓熟能生巧，那时还要谈灵感吗？

People often thinks of artistic inspiration arriving in a sort of thunderbolt moment of creativity.

The truth is, almost nothing is created out of thin air. "Great works of art set a standard, set the bar," says Clint Brown, author of Artist to Artist: Inspiration and Advice from Artists Past and Present. "Although they can be humiliating in a certain sense because they're powerful… they can give you new ideas and help things connect in your own work."

Wikipedia on Inspiration: Inspiration in artistic composition refers to an irrational and unconscious burst of creativity. Literally, the word means "breathed upon," and it has its origins in both Hellenism and Hebraism in the west.

In Greek thought, inspiration meant that the poet or artist would go into ecstasy or furor poeticus, the divine frenzy or poetic madness. He or she would be transported beyond his own mind and given the gods' or goddesses own thoughts to embody.

In Christianity, inspiration is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Saint Paul said that all of the Bible is inspired by God, and the account of Pentecost records the Holy Spirit descending with the sound of a mighty wind.

In the 18th century in England, .... John Locke's model of the human mind suggested that ideas associate with one another and that a string in the mind can be struck by a resonant idea. Therefore, inspiration was a somewhat random but wholly natural association of ideas and sudden unison of thought......Romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Poet), and Percy Bysshe Shelley saw inspiration in terms similar to the Greeks: it was a matter of madness and irrationality.

Sigmund Freud and other later psychologists located inspiration in the inner psyche of the artist. The artist's inspiration came out of unresolved psychological conflict or childhood trauma. Further, inspiration could come directly from the subconscious. Like the Romantic genius theory and the revived notion of "poetic phrenzy," Freud saw artists as fundamentally special, and fundamentally wounded.
Materialist theories of inspiration again diverge between purely internal and purely external sources. Marx did not treat the subject directly, but the Marxist theory of art sees it as the expression of the friction between economic base and economic super-structural positions, or as an unaware dialog of competing ideologies, or as an exploitation of a "fissure" in the ruling class's ideology........

In modern psychology, inspiration is not frequently studied, but it is generally seen as an entirely internal process. In each view, however, whether empiricist or mystical, inspiration is, by its nature, beyond control.