THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: Having influences does not necessarily make your artwork derivative. After watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, I saw lots of artistic influences in there, and yet what he created was completely original.
Speaker 2: It’s the Inspiration Place podcast with artist Miriam Schulman. Welcome to The Inspiration Place podcast, an art World Insider podcast for artists by an artist, where each week we go behind the scenes to uncover the perspiration and inspiration behind the art. And now your host, Miriam Schulman.
Miriam Schulman: Hey there, I’m Miriam Schulman, in case we haven’t met yet. I’m the author of Artpreneur and I’m your curator of inspiration as well as founder of the Artist Incubator program. Now, I’ve been a professional artist for over 25 years and since about 2018, which holy cow, that’s like six, seven, eight years ago. I’ve been coaching other artists to do the same. Now, a lot of artists struggle with uncovering their signature style, and some of them think if they are using other influences, then their art is derivative. However, as I talk about in my book Artpreneur, you can always take a sprinkle of all your influences to create something that’s completely original and yours. Now let’s get back to the Odyssey, because I have to admit that when I set out to watch it, I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did. I actually went with the expectation of, oh, I’m just going to see the scenery. And you know, my husband had a meeting that night. So I went by myself and I happened to go to Lincoln Center, where they have an Imax theater. I think it’s one of the largest on the East Coast. And as soon as it started, I got sucked into this other world. Now the moment I knew was like, Holy cow! I just love this movie was pretty early on, actually. I think it was the first scene. So they show the Trojan horse kind of half buried in the sand with the ocean lapping it.
Miriam Schulman: And I was like, where have I seen that before? I was like, oh, right, planet of the apes. This is the Statue of Liberty. Ding ding ding. Okay, there’s an influence right there. And then a little later in the movie, one of the gory scenes that they show it was, I’m going to butcher the Greek name. It was the Cyclops, I think. I think you say Polymethyl, he’s this is kind of gross. So cover your ears or your eyes or look away. He was eating one of Odysseus’s men, but as soon as he started doing it, I was like, It’s Goya, it’s Goya’s Saturn devouring his young. And it wasn’t just my imagination, and this wasn’t a subliminal influence. Christopher Nolan confirmed that that was his influence for that scene. And in fact, they had posters of Goya’s painting up when they where they were creating the monster for the movie and editing that scene, because they really did want to capture that. So this was not a resemblance uncovered by art historians after the fact. You know how art historians are saying, well, this was influenced by that. And you’re thinking to myself, what? What are they talking about? Didn’t they just paint a tree because there was a tree in the landscape? No. Every decision an artist makes is intentional. Every decision that this filmmaker made for every scene very intentional.
Miriam Schulman: What to add in, what to leave out. Now, if you ever worried that studying another artist too closely will keep you from finding your own style, Christopher Nolan proves the exact opposite. Let’s talk about the false choices artists make about originality, because usually underneath their fear, they fear that it’s a binary choice. Like either you’re going to study and model other artists and you’re going to risk being derivative, or you protect your originality by avoiding influence. And somehow you feel you’re going to invent a style out of nothing. So neither one is really going to serve you. Nobody makes a first painting, a song, a film, a body of work with a fully formed original point of view in the beginning. Influence functions like training wheels. Artists learn technique by modeling what already works. That’s why many artists go into museums and they copy paintings. They copy the masters. Michelangelo copied the Greeks, and the Romans copied the Greeks, and people copied Michelangelo. So there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is when you don’t take the training wheels off, that’s the problem never taking off your training wheels. Now, there is a story that I don’t think made it into my book Artpreneur. I had the problem when I was a kid of keeping my training wheels on too long. I mean, I had them on through the third grade and then we moved to Atlanta, which if you listen to my Girl Scout story, it’s pretty hilly in Atlanta.
Miriam Schulman: So being somebody who learned to stop their bicycle by crashing into bushes worked great when I lived in Florida. But when I moved to Atlanta, that was kind of dangerous. So right after I moved to Atlanta, I had a really bad accident where I fell off my bike and I actually broke my jaw. And I know that sounds gruesome, which is probably why that didn’t make it into the book, but that was what happens when you leave your training wheels on too long. You never learn how to master riding the bike yourself. So this is like somebody still being dependent on a single teacher solutions and have not yet developed their own visual vocabulary. So it’s okay to study others work as long as you move on. The influence definitely gives you a vocabulary, and style is what happens when you decide what you want and what you want to say with that vocabulary. Now, this isn’t just an art school question. An incohesive body of work is difficult to remember. It’s difficult to describe and curate and market, but a recognizable signature style helps the collectors connect one artwork to another and recognize the artist without seeing necessarily what the signature is. So a signature style is part of your production plan, not just a decorative luxury artist can postpone indefinitely. It’s something you need to do. That doesn’t mean your art can’t evolve over time.
Miriam Schulman: Picasso’s art evolved from Rose period to Cubism to his more mature period. Christopher Nolan’s movies have evolved since. We’re talking about that today. The Odyssey is a very different visual experience than inception. But the thing is, is that whether you’re a filmmaker or you’re an artist, you’re creating worlds. And when you do bring in your influences, you’re doing so as a starting point. But then to build upon it. So Christopher Nolan brought in Goya’s subject matter, and he borrowed the power from it. So Saturn is the Roman counterpart of the Greek god Cronus, who actually consumed his children to prevent them from overthrowing him. And the painting’s power comes from its terror the frantic eyes, the distorted anatomy, the darkness, the appetite, the destruction of one generation by another. And the way Christopher Nolan did this is he had the Cyclops in the cave so that it was complete with the cave closed. So it was completely dark. And then he had the naked body of the Cyclops. So it looked like Saturn with white. And even though it just had one eye, the eye was bulging. So it was so clear to me that this is what the film director was trying to do. And all art history nerds like me all probably had a nerdgasm during that scene. Now, what Nolan did was he took a different mythological figure in a different story, but borrowed the imagery.
Miriam Schulman: So Odysseus men are not the children. The narrative meaning has changed, but the visual vocabulary stayed the same. What he actually took from the painting was the emotional temperature, the primal feelings, the power relationship, a giant body reducing a human being to just a small thing. And the terrible intimacy of him eating with his hands. Also, the darkness and the claustrophobia of the painting was very real in the film, the way they filmed it in the darkness, and then the feeling that the monster is some somewhat human, which also makes it even more disturbing. Now I just want to confirm some of the production details. Nolan definitely said the Goya painting was very much the inspiration. His team kept the image on the wall and showed it to new collaborators. As creature work on the Cyclops developed. And then the Cyclops was built through a mixture of performance, mime, puppetry, animation, robotics, and visual effects. So here’s the lesson in it for us artists. Nolan did not reproduce the painting and call it original. What he did was extracted the quality he needed, Goya’s particular flavor of human horror, and then put it into a different character, a different medium, a different scale, and a different narrative That suggests a very useful rule to us as artists. You’re not going to copy the other artists? Finished? Answer. It’s not like we’re copying a painting of Goya’s painting as a painting, but you’re identifying the problem they solved or the feeling they created, and find your own way to create that.
Miriam Schulman: I want to use the spice versus meal diagnostic. A spice changes the flavor of the work without becoming the entire meal. If somebody who’s experienced the artwork can taste just the one sauce, then the influence has overpowered what you’re doing. But the sauce has been metabolized with several other ingredients. The results begin to acquire its own identity. This is where the spice metaphor matters for your art. Because many artists don’t have an influence problem, they have a mixing problem. They either stay so close to one teacher that the work still looks like a class assignment, or they bounce between so many styles that a collector would never know the same artist made them. Now, you don’t need fewer influences, but you do need a stronger point of view. That’s one of the reasons I wrote Artpreneur, the step by step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living from Your Creativity. Inside the book, I show you how to stop relying on those creative training wheels, amplify the quirks that make your work memorable, and combine your influences until the result becomes recognizably yours. But finding your signature style is only one piece of building a sustainable art career. Artpreneur gives you five practical plans for creating a cohesive, marketable body of work. Pricing it for profit, finding collectors. Promoting it without feeling pushy and using your time on the actions that actually support sales.
Miriam Schulman: Because great art with no plan stays invisible and a great business plan cannot rescue artwork that looks like everybody else’s. So go to Artpreneurbook.com and get your copy. Let’s get back to The Odyssey, because the Odyssey was never a single, untouchable art object. The story was actually born through the retelling. So before the Odyssey was a fixed book by Homer read silently, it lived through oral performance. Bards performed it, remembered it, and transmitted the story, and its variations were part of its life. Even an early surviving papyrus fragment contains lines absent from the standardized texts that we know today. So Nolan isn’t the first person to, quote unquote, change Homer. Change is part of the evolution of the story and the visual tradition of creating Homer story for the screen, for the art, for everything began long before this film. So I want to give you a few more examples rather than a long art history lecture. Although I would love to like bore you to death with art history. Trust me. Let’s talk about the blinding of Polyphemus on Greek pottery. So ancient vase painters compressed the violence into silhouettes and gestures. The met describes a sixth century BCE example as rendering an extraordinary event with a bare minimum of artistic means. Same story, completely different visual grammar from Goya or Nolan. Let’s next talk about Cersei. Last summer, I immersed myself completely in Greek inspired literature.
Miriam Schulman: One of my favorites was Madeline Miller’s book Cersei, and one of the things I went into Nolan’s Odyssey expecting to be disappointed about was the witch Cersei in Miller’s Cersei. It’s a beautiful sexual love story, and she’s a pro-sex feminist. Cersei. She’s a witch. In Nolan’s version, we don’t see sex between that Cersei and Matt Damon. I think there are no sex scenes in this odyssey, actually. Yeah, none. Which is what I was expected to be disappointed about. However, The Cersei in this film was inspired by art as well. Let’s talk about it. So Odysseus pursues Cersei while his men appear mid-transformation into animals, and this is on a mixing bowl. The ancient artists had to make invisible magic visible on a stationary, curved surface, so he showed the men halfway through their transformation in order to tell that story. So yeah, for those of you who’ve not seen the movie and are not familiar with it, she basically the witch Cersei would transform men into pigs because she thought they they were pigs. They were acting like pigs. They came to eat our food and to keep them from raping her, she turned them into pigs. What I loved about the movie version is. And the site. This detail. I’m pretty sure it’s not in Homer’s The Odyssey. It’s definitely not in Madeline Miller either. When she turns them from pigs back into humans, she says, return into your disguises.
Miriam Schulman: So in the movie version, she’s basically saying that the pig version is their natural state, and the human version was the disguise. It’s completely different statement. Just that was so interesting the way Nolan put that in there. So this is already an active interpretation. Let’s talk about another piece of art. This is Roman Polyphemus and Galatea. So this is a Roman fresco that gives the Cyclops Polyphemus another identity. This time he’s a shepherd and a rejected lover rather than only a cannibalistic monster, one inherited character becomes terrifying. In one artist’s hands, but in another, a sympathetic character. So let me make a bigger point here. What artists are doing is not simply inheriting a subject. They inherit a conversation about a subject. One of the things that was very different about Nolan’s Odyssey than Homer is the way Nolan put in a Christian theme throughout. So he invented this thing called Zeus’s Law, which I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard before in any of the Greek literature I’ve ever read. I don’t know, you can let me know in the comments, but this is more like the Golden rule do unto others as though you do unto yourself, which is a very Christian theme. And he kept that Christian theme and the moral of the story throughout the whole thing. And Matt Damon’s confession to Anne Hathaway at the end was part of this Christian theme that Christopher Nolan had put into it.
Miriam Schulman: So he’s using the subject matter again to tell his own story with it, his own version of it. That’s a beautiful thing for artists to do. Every era gets to take the characters according to what the era fears and admires and wants to examine. Subject matter doesn’t determine originality. Thousands of artists can work with the same exact myth, the same exact flower, the same exact landscape or human body, and still make fundamentally different art. I think there was a lot of political messaging in this that I. I’m not a Greek scholar, so I don’t know if anyone else has already said this, but in Christopher Nolan’s version, I found it very interesting how the movie made a point of saying, oh, it wasn’t just to honor Helen, that Helen was like, ran away with this other guy. Which, by the way, very cheekily, one of the characters said, are you sure she didn’t want to run away with him? They absolutely said that Helen leaving her husband for this guy was an excuse that they made in order to open the trade, open the pathway for trade, that that was the real reason they had the war. Hmm. Sounds a little familiar, doesn’t it? Today’s Middle East. Interesting. So you do not have to invent a subject nobody has ever touched before. You have to reveal what only you notice when you interpret it. Nolan had a visual spice cabinet to choose from.
Miriam Schulman: Goya was one ingredient Nolan has also described or acknowledged a much wider cinematic lineage. Ray Harryhausen’s mythological creature work was an influence. Del Toro’s principle that a monster must be treated as a character rather than merely as a monster had an influence in his work. The Trojan Horse on the beach was deliberately designed to echo the fallen Statue of Liberty in Planet of the apes. The cinematic touchstones include the scale, the severity of the lived in worlds of Ron and Andrei Rublev, and, of course, Nolan’s own established preferences for filmmaking influenced this movie, so physical locations, practical effects, monumental Imax imagery which, yes, I got to see it at Lincoln Square, which, you know, this is a new guilty pleasure. I always thought that I had to go to the movies with somebody else, I think, and I’m 57 years old. I think this is the first time I ever went to the movies by myself. I’m definitely doing it again. Documentary style encounters with real weather, water, bodies and scale and the psychological ambiguity. Psychological ambiguity. I can’t talk psychological ambiguity, ambiguity around supernatural events. Let’s talk about the combination of his influence, because Goya alone could have produced an elegant quotation, and I would have had my happy little art history nerdgasm and gone home happy. The nostalgia. The Harryhausen could have influenced him. The historical realism alone could have produced museum reconstruction, but Nolan combines all of them with his own recurring obsessions time, guilt, consequence, perception, and humans attempt to control forces larger than themselves.
Miriam Schulman: That’s the Nolan style. It’s a pattern of choices he repeats across his movie projects. I have not seen all his movie projects, but hey, I think he’s gotten a new fan girl here. Your signature style is the same way. It’s not one gimmick you paste onto everything. It’s kind of like how I talked about my client, Greg Malphurs. I said, the mask is maybe one visual gimmick that you used in this series, and you don’t have to keep repeating it, but it’s part of a family of decisions that you keep making. It’s part of the world you’re building. Now let’s talk about the music, because the music and Nolan’s The Odyssey completely blew me away. I loved it, but I didn’t even know what I was loving and I had to research it afterwards. So they made a deliberate choice. There’s another name I’m going to butcher. I am so sorry. His first name is Ludwig. Okay. Help me out. Göransson. Göransson. I hope that’s right. Who created the score? He’s got to get an Oscar for this. So Nolan gave him one specific direction, which was no familiar sounds, no traditional strings orchestration. He wanted it to feel like the Bronze Age. This is radical. So most audience associate enormous orchestras with ancient epics like you Think about Ben-Hur or I don’t know, I don’t know.
Miriam Schulman: And this has been a Hollywood convention. What did Nolan do? He says, no, no, no, we’re not going to do that. He wanted to sound like the Bronze Age, the Bronze Age of ancient Greece. So by removing the orchestra prevented Göransson from relying on familiar frameworks. But that’s where originality is always born. It’s always born through these kind of constraints. So the score has a lot of bronze. So he made that part of the sound world. He assembled 35 bronze gongs of different sizes and experimented with their voices. Pretty cool right? Also he used ooh, I’m going to totally butcher this one too. Aloes. I’ll spell it for you. A ULOS. These are an ancient double reed instrument with an intense piercing and sometimes almost animal sound. So this helped the score feel ritualistic and bodily rather than classical. This was not your typical John Williams score. And then, of course, he used the leer. This connects directly to ancient song and storytelling. So it’s a plucked string instrument, and it carries the association with the sound of Odysseus’s bow. So the music, identity and weapon folded into one sound. This is about the bardic tradition. An important feature of Homer’s The Odyssey is the fact that it was originally songs from the Bard. And what Nolan did, what Nolan did was so genius he used Travis Scott as a bard, which created a bridge between the ancient keeper of communal memory and a contemporary rhythmic storyteller.
Miriam Schulman: And then they also use synthesizers and modern processing with the music. So the composer did not attempt an archeological reconstruction of the Bronze Age. He used electronics to allow the music to feel ancient, yet it still felt contemporary. That’s what made it so magical. Now, in my research of finding out why the music was just like, so powerful. So during the burning of Troy and also the attack on the suitors, the composer used what’s known as a reset. Is that how you say it? Reset rhythm. Okay, you music nerds can correct me in the comments. Again, this is an overlapping rhythmic layers, creating the illusion of continuous acceleration. Nolan and Hans Zimmer had explored the same technique in Dunkirk, and Göransson repurposes this technique again but for a different world. So this was kind of something in the toolbox that Nolan had already had. And the new composer was able to use the same thing, but in a different way. So this shows you how artists can borrow from their own earlier experiments and collaborators and bring it into a new form of art. Let’s talk about the core lesson is of the music score. Göransson didn’t say, how do I reproduce ancient Greek music exactly? No. He asked himself, which ancient materials and ideas can I combine with modern tools to make this world emotionally real now? Because that’s what creates emotional resonance. The score feels original because bronze breath, strings, voices, electronics, and rhythm interact in a way that belongs in this film.
Miriam Schulman: So original artists don’t necessarily invent raw ingredients. It’s like a new recipe. They create relationships between ingredients that already existed, but in a new way that didn’t exist before. Let’s talk about your signature style as an artist, because a lot of artists think they have to develop a signature style, when really it’s about uncovering something that’s already there. And that’s the work that I do with artists. Inside, my signal excavation style emerges through choices repeated over time, not through selecting a fashionable esthetic and announcing it as this is your brand. So let’s talk about how to develop a signature style. You develop enough mastery in your subject to choose deliberately. You learn the fundamentals. You study the masters. Of course, early derivative work is not proof of failure. It’s part of the learning process. Eventually, though, you must move from how did my teacher do this to what serves me for what I’m trying to say? But mastery does give artists the ability to break the rules intentionally rather than accidentally. And sometimes breaking accidents accidentally does create your style. Step two you name the exact spice, not merely the influence. So instead of saying I’m influenced by Goya, you identify the precise quality that you’re getting. His darkness, the distorted body, the psychological terror, the contrast between loose handling and brutal clarity, his willingness to make an image ugly enough to be truthful and then ask the same questions of every one of your influences.
Miriam Schulman: What visual or emotional problem did this artist solve? Which decision creates the response I’m having? Is it the color, the scale, the edge, the pattern, the space, the material, the rhythm, the pacing, the subject or the meaning? The more precisely, artists can name the ingredient, the less likely they are to copy the whole recipe. Step three choose influences that do not all come from the same shelf. You want to combine artists from different eras rather than following one contemporary trend. Look beyond your own medium. A painter might borrow rhythm from music. You might borrow scale from architecture. Göransson’s score works because his influence include material history, ancient instruments, oral poetry, electronic music, and cinematic suspense techniques. Step four add the ingredient nobody else can access. That’s you. Your personal history, your values, your humor, your obsessions. Your cultural identity, your impatience, your meticulousness, or your other quirks of process. You can find lots of videos on YouTube about developing your signature style, but see how I took this breakdown of the Odyssey? Because this is something I want to talk about, and used it as a vehicle to teach you about signature style. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. This is how you can embrace your inner weirdo and let the influence combine in a way that it couldn’t do for anybody else and not be afraid of what makes you weird.
Miriam Schulman: Yeah, it’s a little weird that all I read last year was Greek themed books. I totally did. I read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die and Bull From the sea, which was basically about Theseus. I read Madeline Miller’s Circe and Song of Achilles. I don’t even think I stopped there. I think I kept going, but those those were my definitely my four favorites. Oh, no, no no. Silence of the girls. That was a retelling of the Iliad. But from the woman’s perspective, from a feminist point of view. And I think I read another Pat Barker’s book and then I read Arion by I don’t remember her name. So it was funny because when I was going into the Odyssey, one of my friends said, oh, you can ask Claude to give you a breakdown of names before you go in there. And I was like, no, thank you. I’m actually good. Step five. Work in a series and look for what recurs. So one artwork can be an experiment, but style becomes visible across your body of work. Notice what choices recur even when you’re not consciously forcing them, and then repeat what feels alive to you, not merely what receives the easiest compliment. Allow your art to evolve. It should totally continue to evolve your entire life, but your signature will still be recognizable. It’s not a prison sentence. Let’s wrap up. The cyclist image felt powerful before I knew that Nolan definitely used Goya.
Miriam Schulman: Learning the source did not make it seem less original. It made the scene richer because I could see the conversation happening across the centuries. Nolan didn’t invent Odysseus either, or poly, cis, or even the Trojan horse. Go ahead. Didn’t invent the myth of Saturn, for that matter. And the composer Göransson did not invent bronze. The alos, the lyre, the human voice rapping synthesizers or accelerating rhythm. The originality lived in their selection, the relationships, their transformation, and their point of view. So let’s return to Artpreneur. The key to creating a signature style is to capture just a spice of each of your influences, and combine them in a new way. So your style does become completely original. Remember, your job is not to make art without ancestors. Your job is to choose your ancestors and then make something none of them could have made, because none of them lived your life, carried your obsessions or saw the world through your eyes. If you liked the show, I bet you would really like chapter six of my book. Artpreneur. Embrace your inner weirdo and you should definitely dive into that. It is available audiobook, Kindle, and of course at your favorite bookshop. You can find that right now though, if you go to Artpreneurbook.com. So that’s it, my friend. I’ll see you the same place same time next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to the Inspiration Place podcast. Connect with us on facebook at facebook.com/SchulmanArt, on Instagram at @SchulmanArt, and of course on SchulmanArt.Com.
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