“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 find that's almost
never the case.” 
―    Chuck Close

"All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of
no-mind, from inner stillness." -Eckhart Tolle