What are you inspired by that is not part of the art world? (tv, music, reading, etc.)

"Inspired" is a strong word.  There are many, many things that "interest" me.  For example, I am almost a fanatical religious-like devotee of RadioLab.  I have been inspired by segments and ideas within the various shows but mostly I find them profoundly interesting which is nothing to overlook.  But inspiration, at least in my mind, seems to suggest a more powerful transcendence of sorts.  To be inspired is to be moved to action in some particular direction, fueled by the borrowed energy of this thing that you know or believe now that you didn't before.  Actually it doesn't even seem to resonate as knowledge or belief, it is more like a glimpse at something impermanent and true.

Moby Dick

  I began reading Moby Dick while on a trip as a visiting artist to Ecuador.  I stayed with an artist who didn't speak any English and I don't speak Spanish. So there we were walking the city during the day, trying to meet up with his English speaking friend of the evenings and at night I had this tedious book to deal with.  So it began in this way, having never read it in high school as some do.

It was June of a particular year that I began the book and June of the following year that I finished the book.  My relationship to Moby Dick during this year was probably not unlike most people who read it.  It is tedious and difficult.  I read and re-read passages, sometimes because I wasn't paying any attention and sometimes because I was and I needed to read it again.  If you had asked me why I was reading Moby Dick, I would have said - its a classic, and its good to be well read etc..  It wasn't until I finished the book, and I mean literally when I closed the book, that I realized, Moby Dick was the most important book that I have ever read.  I was truly inspired by this book.  I made paintings that lean on the imagery and attempt to corroborate with Moby Dick for years afterwards.  It is still part of my visual language.

I talk about this relationship when I give lectures about my paintings.  I try to adequately answer the question of why this book is so important and it is difficult to pin down.  It has something to do with the connection between Ahab and the whale - that they are locked in this inevitability.  They are the same entity in a sense, already dead and having missed the correct moment.  Its about the power of obsession and unchecked murderous ambition between them both.  I talk about quiet moments in my paintings - a lack of action.  Figures and cows seem to stand motionless in the tumultuous wake of the backgrounds they inhabit.  They are looming half dead specters of  ideas and emotions. When I read Moby Dick, I started harpooning them and setting a red-wing blackbird atop the pole.  The harpoon is a burden, that terrible burden that cannot be undone but does not stop our pervasive ambition.
 

Moby Dick

The Chase - First Day

"But these were broken again by the light toes of hundreds of gay fowls softly feathering the sea, alternate with their fitful flight; and like to some flagstaff rising from the painted hull of an argosy, the tall but shattered pole of a recent lance projected from the white whales back; and at intervals one of the cloud of soft-toed fowls hovering, and to and fro skimming like a canopy over the fish, silently perched and rocked on this pole, the long tail feathers streaming like pennons." - Herman Melville.