Nick Cave shares advice on finding inspiration: “I keep on going regardless of my successes or failures”
Australian musician and artist Nick Cave has shared his thoughts on finding creative inspiration in his most recent instalment of The Red Hand Files. Cave has been answering fan questions on the site for the past few years, offering insights into his thoughts about life and art.
When asked how to find not only inspiration but a sense of faith too, Cave explained that you must seek them out rather than wait around. He argued against Franz Kafka’s claim: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.”
Instead, Cave believes: “Inspiration is not something that finds you, or offers itself to you, nor for that matter is faith. Inspiration and faith are similar in so far as they both ask something of us. They each require real and constant practical application.”
He continued: “For me, inspiration comes only when I practice certain things regularly and rigorously. I must commit fully to the task in hand, sit down each day, pick up my pencil (actually, it is a medium black or blue Bic Biro) and get to work.”
“It is not exactly toiling down the coal mines, but it is labour enough, and I undertake it through the good times and the bad, through the dry periods and the periods of abundance, and I keep on going regardless of my successes or failures. Inspiration comes because I put in the work.”
Comparing inspiration to faith, Cave shared: “Faith is not something that just magically materialises, rather, it first calls to us with its demands, and sometimes these demands are significant. Faith in the universe, for example, requires our active participation.”
Previously, Cave has shared his advice on grief, following the death of two of his sons, Arthur and Jethro, over the last few years. He revealed that “The care from the audience saved me,” stating, “I was helped hugely by my audience, and when I play now, I feel like that’s giving something back. What I’m doing artistically is entirely repaying a debt.”
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