Bees, moving from flower to flower collecting pollen to make into honey, helping the flowers to reproduce. Without bees pollinating the blooms they visit, many plants would die out, numerous crops would fail, and the animals, birds and humans that depend upon them would starve and die. The bee is probably unaware of its essential role in the grand scheme of things: it’s just doing a job in its own corner of the universe. Similarly, the picture you paint, the words you write, the music you compose or play is part of the fabric of the culture. If we surrender to the creative impulse, our singular piece of the puzzle takes its proper shape and adds to the whole.

This is adapted from a chapter called Intention in Rick Rubin’s acclaimed book on creativity, The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rubin is that big beardy guy who popularised hip hop through co-founding Def Jam Records many moons ago and rejuvenated the career of Johnny Cash, encouraging him to try new material in the autumn of his years. It’s fair to say that he probably knows more than many about the creative spark.

The truth of his observation was brought home to me one evening during my life drawing class. About eight of us meet to draw a nude model every week. One or two use the long pose to paint a portrait in oils; another collages pieces of paper to produce a varied ground on which to draw; one chap with a more limited attention span produces two or three drawings during that long pose – sometimes they verge on cartoons with widely distorted features. All of these add to the greater whole: to be without one – as sometimes happens when someone is sick or on holiday – lessens the impact of the evening. When the model tours the room, taking photographs on his/her phone of the finished pieces, he/she sees a range of interpretations of the human body. In Rick Rubin’s words, “each singular piece of the puzzle…adds to the whole”.

This seems like a useful place to stop. I first posted here in March 2015. A great deal has happened over those years – both personally and in the wider world – and the place of blogs seems to have diminished somewhat. I have looked at numerous topics to do with drawing and painting, reported on courses I’ve attended, shared some thoughts about life models, loosening up, and learning from other artists. In recent years, though, I find I have less to say, and the ever longer gaps between posts admonish me with their silence.

Two subjects continue to nag away though. The first is the role of social media in creativity: I stopped trying to post here on a weekly basis when I realised the images I was posting were suffering in terms of quality. The same feeling hit me recently about Instagram, where I’ve been a much more regular contributor. Social media for me was a place where I could post pictures and connect with sympathetic people whose work I admired. Eventually, though, it became a hamster wheel where the need for ‘likes’ overtakes the value of the work itself. Every now and then you have to step down and breathe, or play, or experiment, or create without worrying about whether it’ll get over 100 likes or not.

The second subject is inspiration. I remain intrigued by the whole question of inspiration, its fickle nature, and its source. I’m sometimes baffled by some of the artists I follow on Instagram who seem content to keep recycling a single idea: I know galleries like this – if they can sell one flower painting they feel they can sell another, and don’t want their artists to start submitting something else – but what’s in it for the artist beyond sales? Is it rewarding or satisfying? Are they inspired to produce only one kind of painting, or was that their original inspiration that they feel safe in endlessly reproducing?

Where does inspiration come from anyway? It’s a mysterious thing, isn’t it? A couple of years ago I was rather ill with anaemia and lacked both the energy and the inspiration to do much of any quality. Responding to online ‘challenges’ ( see previous post) or drawing cards for the birthdays of family and friends kept me going, but my inspiration was as low as my red blood cells for some months. If inspiration comes from God – as the late Madeleine L’Engle claims in her book, Walking on Water – why did He withdraw it when I needed it the most? If it comes from a common source of inspiration that feeds off the work of artists past and present, why does it dry up – sometimes for ever? Perhaps these are questions that can never be answered.

Thank you to all of you who have followed this blog, sometimes for years, even when posts were thin on the ground. I followed the ‘likes’ of a post I produced a few years ago and was sad to see how many have stopped posting. One or two worried me in their silence – the lady who suffered from depression and ADHD who suddenly stopped, the woman who started drawing when her beloved husband died suddenly whose site somehow disappeared from my Reader. I hope they’ve simply found other outlets for their creativity.

I’m not saying that I won’t post ever again, just that this feels like a good time and place to pause. Thank you again for your time, engagement, and encouragement. It meant – and means – a great deal to me.