The inspiration for this past week’s work came out of an idea I had while watching a movie the previous week. The movie sparked something in my mind to paint the painting that I did. The movie itself isn’t important on its own; rather, what is important is the fact that other creative works, such as movies, can spark interest and creative tendencies in individuals.

I have always found a love for movies and the fact that both the good and bad ones can spark an interest in me to research something, watch another movie or in this case create something. Up until recently I thought that I watched a fair number of movies, however I think that Matt Delvin might have almost everyone beat, including myself.

As a University of Western Ontario student, Matt Devlin is attempting to watch 365 movies over the course of 2010. Watching on average seven movies a week, Devlin will watch everything from sappy romantic comedies to hardcore action films.

To keep track of what he has watched Devlin has started a blog called “The Devlin Wears Prada” where he not only is keeping track of the movies he has watched but is doing a small review of each movie and rating each film as well.

Devlin has got balls (for lack of a better word), as this is a lot of movie watching. Having spent far too many days watching nothing but movies I know that you can easily kill an entire day watching 5 or more movies, which will be a good thing for Devlin as I am sure there will be days when he won’t have the time to watch any movies at all.

With that said, I am sure by the end of the year Devlin will have watched a ton of good movies and far more shitty movies. On top of this, I am sure that even without trying to do so Devlin will have had a number of creative ideas come to him because of the movies.

Because of the power of movies to inspire and because I think Devlin’s initiative is one which has positive implications I wanted to make mention of it today.

Watching movies and TV aren’t always bad things, as some people might want you to believe, watching movies and TV can help spark and start any number of things. As far as myself is concerned, watching a simple movie¹ pointed me in the direction to paint last week’s project.

1. A crappy movie at that [↩]