Inspiration

Q: What aesthetic choices have you made to create your own voice?

A: Well, ever since I started my career interviewers have asked me: what is your inspiration? However, this is not a straightforward question, because I have no singular inspiration from which I have drawn an influence, certainly none which would have had such an influence that it would dominate my overall aesthetic.

However, in an attempt to give some form of an answer: I would say that all the things that I love, from film, music , art, architecture, graphic design and fashion design, from writers, to thinkers, poets, photographers and to the simple act of looking at nature, have all contributed to the formation of my own aesthetic choices in a way that light fills a room without the room consciously seeking that light ––so, if, if you like, it is the light which filled me through my response to its brightness that has allowed me to create my own aesthetic voice.

Of course ––you might ask: what is unique then to that voice and I would respond by saying that it is unique because it creates its own mood –– a mood unique to how I see the world and how the world is seen in me.

You see ––a world that can be created through photography, or through the pure sound of a poem. It’s mood. I’m attracted to the mood conveyed by either a film, or the look of a painting, or even the colours one finds in nature.

I suppose ––that after a long time of absorbing these moods, textures and sounds I have built up a rolodex of aesthetic atmospheres which allow me to create in my own work the moods that have affected me most and though that work I hope to convey a world through which this mood is given created life.

So now after many years being a designer, of being a conveyer of moods, I would have to say that this idea of a singular inspiration is not important to me, no specific designer, no specific painter, nor any specific creative at all has such an influence ––I have, in a way, learned to breathe, because I learned to exhale a world into being as devoid of conscious aforethought as the swelling of my lungs are in the act of breathing.

Images without influence