Ask how artists find inspiration and you rarely get a straight answer. Inspiration does not always arrive as a dramatic landscape, a memorable occasion, or some perfectly composed view waiting to be discovered. Sometimes it is much quieter than that. Here are three paintings and three ordinary moments: a yellow bench in a Delaware garden, a sky that turned rosy for about a minute during a walk in the woods, and a sunflower simply too big to ignore. None of these were events, and nobody would have stopped a car for any of them. They were small details that might easily have been passed by without a second thought.
Each became a painting anyway. That is what makes them useful examples of how artists find inspiration. The important part was not necessarily what the scene was, but what happened when he really looked at it. Something about the color, light, shape, or feeling made an ordinary moment worth holding onto. The paintings grew from those moments, not from a plan to find something impressive to paint, and the reason behind each one says more about the work than any account of technique could.
Key Takeaways
It Starts With a Moment, Not a Plan: In his words, deciding to paint something usually begins with a moment that catches his attention.
Light Is Most Often the Trigger: Light can change a scene completely, bringing out color and depth that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The Ordinary Qualifies: A bench, a passing sky, a single flower. The subject does not need to be dramatic to be worth keeping.
Titles Often Arrive With the Scene: The Meeting Place named itself, and so did Watercolor Sky.
The Aim Is Not to Copy What He Saw: It is to capture what made him stop and look, so a viewer stops too.
If a scene of your own comes to mind, you are welcome to get in touch.
How Artists Find Inspiration in an Ordinary Object
He and his wife set out one spring morning for Winterthur Gardens in Delaware, and the timing turned out close to perfect. Azalea Woods stood in full bloom, so the forest was loud with color.
Along the way they passed a yellow bench. They decided to explore separately for a while, agreeing to use it as the spot to meet. That is all it was, a landmark chosen for convenience.
When he came back to meet her, he stopped and actually looked at it. A bright yellow bench, sitting in the middle of all those azaleas. The decision to paint it happened right there, and the title was never in question.
How artists find inspiration often comes down to the order of things, and this one is worth noticing. He walked past the bench once without seeing it, because it was a meeting point rather than a subject. Coming back to it a second time, with nothing to do but wait, is when it became a painting.
What Happens When the Light Lasts a Minute?
The second one was pure chance. A walk through the woods on a fall day, leaves brilliant, the path filled with autumn color.
What caught him was not the leaves. It was the sky. A soft rosy glow settled over everything, and for a short stretch the scene looked less like a photograph and more like a watercolor.
Then it was gone.
This is the hardest kind of subject to work from, because there is nothing to return to. The scene cannot be revisited on a better day. What he took away was the feeling, and the painting is an attempt to put that feeling back rather than to reconstruct the view. The title acknowledges it. He was not painting a wood. He was painting the minute it looked like a different medium.
Sunflower Rhapsody Was Built Rather Than Found
The third works the other way, and it is worth including for the contrast.
Here he wanted drama, and he assembled it. The sunflower went against an unexpected backdrop, a vibrant flower bed with a hint of blue sky showing in one corner. He set the angle of the flower to give it movement, then varied the color and shape of each petal slightly so it read as alive rather than symmetrical.
Then there is the scale. The sunflower is large, and deliberately so. In his description it is not shy or demure.
Movement, color, contrast and size, chosen and combined until the picture had the energy he was after. Some paintings are found. This one was composed.
What Do the Three Have in Common?
The trigger differs each time. A shape noticed on the way back, a light that lasted a minute, an idea worked out at the easel. Underneath all three, though, sits the same thing. He is not trying to reproduce what was in front of him. He is trying to capture what made him stop and look in the first place, so that somebody standing in front of the finished painting stops and feels something too.
That explains a choice that runs through the work. The detail is fine, but it is not there for precision. It is there to help tell the story of the subject and to make a viewer feel they could almost step into the scene. Detail in service of a feeling rather than detail as a display of skill.
Light is doing most of the heavy lifting. It creates warmth and depth, brings out colors you would not otherwise notice, and turns an ordinary moment into something worth keeping. That is what he is chasing more often than not, and there is more on it in the post on art for a calm home.
Frequently Asked Questions
How does James Redding decide what to paint?
How artists find inspiration varies, and for him it usually begins with a moment that catches his attention. Sunlight falling across a landscape, the character of an old building, the color in a flower, or a bird sitting quietly on a branch.
What is the story behind The Meeting Place?
He and his wife used a yellow bench at Winterthur Gardens in Delaware as a place to meet while exploring separately. Coming back to it, surrounded by azaleas in full bloom, he decided to paint it, and the title followed.
Why is it called Watercolor Sky?
A soft rosy glow settled over a wooded autumn scene for a brief moment and gave everything the look of a watercolor. The painting is an attempt to hold that particular light.
Does he paint from life or from photographs?
He takes photographs while out walking, as he did at Winterthur Gardens, and works from what he saw and felt at the time. The aim is the impression that made him stop rather than a literal record.
Can I ask for a painting of a place that means something to me?
Yes. Commissioned scenes of meaningful places are long-standing work for the studio, handled personally. Start with the contact page and describe the place.
The Habit of Stopping
No method here could be handed to somebody else, and no checklist says what qualifies.
What there is, after decades of it, is a habit, and it is as close to an answer about how artists find inspiration as he will give. Notice the thing. Stop rather than walk on. Decide whether the reason you stopped can survive being painted.
A yellow bench survived. A one minute sky survived. It is a low bar in one sense and an impossible one in another, and it is the whole of the job.
You can see where the habit has led on the originals and prints pages, or reach out about a scene of your own.