Inspiration Recorded - Here Begins the Whole Damn Story!

Do you use a moleskine or an idea book to record moments of inspiration or your art when on the road or at home. I do. My thoughts are often captured in late night chicken scratch and the following pattern tends to repeats itself. Bedtime, lights off, head down.....head up, lights on, idea jotted down in the idea book I keep next to my bed....and repeat.

I got to thinking about this last weekend while traveling to visit my parents. Along the way, I was reading John Wesley Powell's account of his exploration of the Colorado River. John Wesley was a one armed-general who cobbled some monies together to ride down a mammoth river on a wood raft. The published account of his trip is a great read (one of my favorites) and is basically a super duper refined moleskine.

When I got to my parents' place I was digging through a book shelf and found travelogues written in 1937 by my Great Aunt Lidy and her husband Bob. My Great Uncle Bob's account of his trip begins with the epic words, "Here begins the whole damn story. The whole truth so help me." It goes on to document the brainstorms and ideas he had as he sailed on a cruise across the Atlantic. Bob designed toys for living and I love the series of pages that describe scale dimensions for a model of the Taj Mahal, observations of puppet plays, marionettes, and actors' masks from Burma, as well as a list of materials that could be used to build a sea monster on wheels. I wonder how many of his ideas came to life once he returned home?

I've also seen several related posts on Create Culture. For example, Melanie D'Arcy recently uploaded images from collages she kept in an ideabook from when she was living in Seattle (See an image below). In her own words, "The collages were an effort to synthesize the essence that I wanted to retain from all of the countless magazines, articles, images, flyers that I had a tendency to accumulate. What did not make it into the collage (depressing articles, clothes or artifacts or pictures I didn't think were interesting, etc) was as significant to me personally as what did make it into the collage. When I finally finished the collages I felt like I had synthesized a vision ~ of my sensibility, interests, etc ~ that I would carry with me into my next decade, & that would inform future work & serve as a reference."

What about you? What pics were drawn, performances planned, compositions penned in your moleskine or ideabooks? I encourage you to share photos from your books here and tell us a little about them. We'd be particularly interested in ideas that struck you while you were traveling and accounts of the spark that caused inspiration to strike.

-John