Artist Spotlight: Paula Holtzclaw

How do you find inspiration?
Paula B. Holtzclaw: I always find visiting art museums, looking through art books and magazines as well as my photographs, to be very inspiring. Experiencing new sights while travelling spark new and exciting material. Just showing up at the canvas will create inspiration! One of my favorite quotes is by Chuck Close, regarding inspiration: “The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I fine that’s almost never the case.”

What is the best thing about being an artist?
Paula B. Holtzclaw: The best thing about being an artist is truly being able to recognize and experience the awareness of the beauty that surrounds us. I believe artists have the gift of being present in the moment; we have to be, in order to absorb and then portray. I know that lucky, and not always common, is the person who is able to do exactly what they love to do.

To see more of Paula’s work, visit:
website