Inspirational Moments: BW Nicol

Inspirational Moments: BW Nicol

Published 1 year ago

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So this month's Inspirational Moment is brought to you by Artist BW Nicol. Have a look at the image and read the blog below. Feeling inspired? Good! Now write us a story of under 2,500 words based on the photo.  The winner will not only get his or her story audio-ed, but it will go up both on Shortbread and on BW Nicol's website as well. 

Inspiration by Kate Smart

People  write for many different reasons.  We all have an instinctive desire to express ourselves, but what really inspires us to pick up the pen or switch on the laptop?  There’s a need perhaps to externalise emotions so that we can understand them more fully; to see events from different perspectives, and make to sense  of ourselves, and our past.  A painting or a piece of music can catapult us back into the past,  triggering  a desire to re-visit and re-make sites of emotional intensity through writing; or indeed forwards to an imaginary future where we can construct a world just as we would like it to be.

Philosophers struggle to articulate what it is that occurs between the painting and the viewer.  Perhaps it’s best left unsaid.  There is an exchange, an offering, a dynamic;  something that reaches beyond the realm of language, structure and logic and even conscious thought – there’s something about the interaction of planes of colour and light and shadow, that touches the place of creativity within us.

This painting is called Afterlife, by BW Nicol, and is shown here by permission of the artist.  Barry is a Scottish, Perthshire-based artist who trained at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art,  Dundee.  His website and contact details can be found here http://www.bw-nicol.blogspot.com  He has also done the artwork for my blog and forthcoming Kindle http://seapenguin-thecurioussheep.blogspot.com

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