Art as inspiration for the writer

Believe me, I search everywhere for inspiration, for any kind of spark that will help me to plot for plotting is my greatest literary weakness.  Quite a blind spot for a writer to have, but I'm just speaking out of honesty.  Often times, I turn to paintings in an attempt to light the creative pilot light.  One of my favorite artists for this purpose is Edward Hopper.  In his work, I can imagine the subjects' past, hear their voices, and in a few cases I can smell and feel the setting.  

So I am always on the lookout for new art...or art that is at the very least new to me.  Today I came across the art of Alex Lukas.  Lukas paints expanses of urban decay.  Motor vehicles are left to rust in wide open, grassy spaces, vegetation wins out the day over anything humanity has so proudly constructed, and  life marches on just fine in what appears to be our absence.  Especially striking to me were Lukas' paintings of cities underwater.  By that I mean our current sprawling metropolises sitting beneath the waves, due presumably to global warming.  I don't know, I could just see kernels of stories pop out of the paintings as they do from time to time with Hopper.  I could imagine the POV of someone heading down to street level of the city...in a submarine.  Perhaps someone who has never really known what "home" is since it all happened.

It's a fun exercise.  Unfortunately, there's very little of Lukas' spectacular work that facilitates what I'm writing now.  So be it.  Back to work.


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