Where to find inspiration for your art

One of the best ways to reignite the creative flame is to look up some of your favourite artists that the artist in you resonates with. One way I look for new artists that I might add to my library of inspirational artists is to look up galleries and go through the artists that they represent and discover some new talents that inspire me. Another way is to look at some of the modern art magazines. Here are a few of them to look up:

Border Crossings
Modern Painters
Canadian Art Magazine

Another way to get inspired is to dedicate a day to go to the portion of the city where you can find a concentrated number of galleries and explore them. Here are a few areas of Vancouver with concentrated number of galleries:

Granville street
Granville Island
Main Street
Culture Crawl (a three day festival in November with 400 artists and 50 studios open to public)

How to grow as an artist

For while now, I have been thinking about making some intentional changes and exploring new techniques, tools and materials in my creative process. Back in the days, my professor at university would talk to us about intentionally sabotaging our paintings in order to create a puzzle in the creative process. I understand where he comes from; when we let go of the fear we face in the process of our work and are being open to making mistakes along the way, the magic happens. As artists we can get caught up with the same habitual techniques, methods, materials, and concepts and forget to push ourselves. In order to grow, we need to sabotage our repetitive habits and surprise ourselves.

Opus art supplies in Vancouver v. Blick art supplies in Los Angeles

I am on a one week art exploration in California. I decided that I wanted to find out the main art supplies stores in L.A. and so I ended up at Blick at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Colby. The store was a bit bigger than the Opus store in Granville Island. I explored every single isle in the store and these are some of the a few things that I found intriguing:

I've been looking to find this amazing triangle shaped palette knife that I have from Bob Ross collection from  Michael's (a craft store in Canada) and Opus just doesn’t' carry it. I found another brand name of the same palette knife at Blick.

I found these giant size oil sticks/oil pastels at Blick. They are about 3/4 inch thick which are great for large scale paintings.

I've been using disposable colour palette at Opus for over a year now. the biggest size they have at opus is 12x 16. Guess what size I found at the Blick? 24x30! I was tempted to buy one, but it wouldn't fit into my luggage; so, I didn't.

And I have been going to so many galleries on this trip and I noticed that the works generally here are extremely large scale. It puts my large scale paintings to shame. And as a result I found that at Blick they have more collections of larger scale canvases, but not a bigcollection on wood panel, which is what I love to paint on. The paintings are mostly done on canvas here.