Title: Songbird
Artist: Dan Dwayne Spencer
Media: Polychrome Pencils
This is one of my drawings from my series Earth Angels. In my drawing here there are two different kinds of songbirds setting on a branch while their muse is silently observing in the background. Every creative individual has a muse or inspiration of some kind or other. A muse may be their pet... their friend... their lover, or it may be the land itself. A writer is no different in this than a visual artist. Without inspiration... our muse... we set looking at the last line written and become blank. I believe that it was the singer songwriter Carley Simon who said that she couldn't write without a visit from her muse. Our inspiration/muses come to us at the oddest times. Ideas drop into my head in the middle of a meal and I start scribbling on a napkin. It can happen in the middle of the night and there I go, off to my office, for the rest of the night. The blank screen in my head turns off and the fingers fly across the keyboard with a new vitality. On the topic of muses Stephen King wrote in his book 'Bag of Bones' "The muses are ghosts, and sometimes come uninvited." Frida Kahlo on the other hand said, "I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know best." Currently I have 70 pages written on my new book, a detective adventure. I have another children's book in the works and I have a series of Bible Story coloring sheets which I have drawn and would like to put into a children's coloring book. So many different directions to take. One path is to finish my detective adventure story... another path is to finish a work for children and still another has to do with my first muse... drawing. Which muse will win over the others? The one I feed.
