Lisa Snellings

Lisa: What 'feeds' your muse? What stimulates your creativity. Do books, music or places influence you?
Dagmara: Music is good to stimulate the creative process which is already underway. I usually like to listen to music corresponding with the piece I’m working on. I listen to medieval or renaissance music when painting a cover for a fantasy book. Melinda was accompanied by Sisters Of Mercy covers, Bowie’s 1. Outside and such. Whereas for the cover painting – other than the inlaid illustrations, it’s a big oil-on-canvas piece -, it took Tom Barman, Nino Rotta’s soundtrack for Casanova and a German band called Samsas Traum.

Physical exercise does well – I did some of my best drawings after spending three or four hours on horseback. I was then training horses for endurance racing, so I often came home rather exhausted. Huge parts of Melinda were created in a similar way – I did the drawings in the afternoons after working with my three-year-old mare. It seems I’m getting along quite well with physical work to do and a deadline dangerously close. Some tension helps.

Poetry is always inspiring. Sometimes, so are computer games.

One thing that gets more and more important the older I get, is to eliminate the noise. Acoustic, visual, whatever. I do not want any piece of information that I consider unnecessary to come through.