Muse

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I got back to my hotel, weary and tired, full of inspiration from that day’s gallery viewings, and realised I had a room to myself for the first time and didn’t know anyone else in the building. So it was time for a self-portrait session, my first for the year. The edit has taken a while, in between travel and sickness and more travel. And initially, I thought it was going to be a story about being on my own in a place far from home. But, I’m going to save that for another day, because as I was editing these shots, I was thinking about my time in Paris (I’m reading a book on Paris at the moment), about creativity and art, about the directions FlowerFolio has taken me and where I want it to go in the coming year…and the word ‘muse’ came to me.

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I’ve seen probably thousands of paintings and sculptures in the past six months alone, because in almost every city I’ve been to, I’ve been in an art gallery (there’re a few exceptions, but the cities where I’ve been to multiple galleries would more than makes up for it tbh). And with that comes literally boundless inspiration. I’ve seen some incredible portraits, and my favourites are often women. And I want to interrogate that.

The idea of a muse as inspiration of the artist is an interesting one, bound up in connotations of femininity, even if not technically true, and particularly painful where the muse is an artist in their own right (Camille Claudel is the first to spring to mind; HuffPost published an article last year on this subject). And always the fact that it is one muse.

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So, I personally don’t think the muse is the right terminology. It smacks of power imbalance and beauty tropes. And it seems more historical fact. But then, why am I drawn to portraits of women? Is it because of their gaze? Is it because of their pose? Or is it because their story beckons?

Whatever it is, and I suspect it is that last one, I am also interested in the idea of a muse and where my inspiration comes from (as posted earlier this week, it can come from writing or visuals and literally any thought in my head). It’s certainly not a single person, and I actually think that it’s an inner thing, for me at least. As in, anything creative is a product of my own relationship or interaction with something else in the world, whether human or object or thought or experience.

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So, when I get to a hotel room, put the camera on the table, and figure, hmm, let’s curl up in bed and take some shots, it’s because of my reaction to the fact that I’ve slept in so many different beds and here I am taking photos to capture that feeling of, ah, another one, but this one’s a double and it’s comfy and I can manipulate this in post to get some black and white self-portraits.

Or am I overthinking all of this? Probably…

-nat 🥀🖤