16 Awe-inspiring Visual Imagery by Paul Henderson (Rise Design Studio)

What is a typical day like for you?

This is an interesting question, as I don’t have too many typical days! Although as a freelancer I hope this is somewhat understandable :) I am a night person so I generally wake up around 11am. Much to my chagrin I immediately fire out of bed and dig into emails and phone messages. Which as you can imagine have likely piled up by this time of day! I handle all my immediate points of contact and then get some food in my stomach. After this I sit down for a bit of meditation. Generally I would also throw a work out in here, but for the time being I am in a bit of a transitional phase as far as locale, so I am letting my body go to crap while I focus on nothing but work! Hence the remainder of the day is spent taking calls, writing emails, and sending contracts, amidst a host of other boring type admin tasks. In between all this nonsense I try to throw in what little actual creative work I can, until the evening rolls around everyone else gets off of work and I can get down to the good stuff. I generally do all my actual design and art work in the evening and at night, and try to wrap up the client work around 11 or midnight so I can spend the next few hours riffing on personal stuff. I try to paint for a couple hours every day, but if I don’t have the energy I plop my butt down and work on some digital stuff just to keep the creative gears engaged. I hit the sack around 3am and prepare to do it all over again the next day! In my spare time, if I have any, I try to hit art openings, museums, and bookstores where I can soak as much more art as possible. So more or less if I am not doing art, talking about art, reading about art, or learning about art I am probably asleep.

What inspires and motivates you to create an image?

Tough question as I think that can vary quite a bit on any given day. But more often then not I would say what inspires me is the work of other artists… and what motivates me is the creative process itself. We live in an interesting time where we have immediate access to so much incredible creative work… I feel as though now more than ever, someone’s art can barely be categorized as an individual creation. Consciously or sub consciously we are all taking in unfathomable amounts of information and imagery everyday. Our art and our creative expressions cannot help but be affected and impacted by that significantly. I often think so much of what I create really isn’t an expression of myself, but more an expression of the collective. I am just channeling everything I have taken in over the years… and through the creative process attempting in some mysterious way to unpack it. That brings me to the second part of this question and the subject of motivation. The creative process for me is an incredibly exciting engagement and a point of motivation in and of itself, because I never know what I am going to get. Even when I do go into a project or piece with an extremely specific end goal in mind (which is rare), it always takes an unforeseen turn somewhere, and it is truly a rare occasion when I come up with anything even remotely resembles my initial ideas. This is extremely motivating because it makes creating something such a mystical and mysterious act. You engage with a subject, vision, feeling, or archetype you want to express in some way and through just the simple act of attempting to do so you encounter all kinds of interesting problems, trials, dilemmas, choices, decisions, and solutions along the way. And in the end its the choices you make that give your art its own character and its own particular style. This is really what makes art and the process of creating so gratifying to me.