The Groove 153 - How to Succeed at Creating Something New
HOW TO SUCEED AT CREATING SOMETHING NEW
One of the characteristics that connects successful artists that enter art history and ambitious entrepreneurs that change the world is the desire to do something that nobody else has done.
And while it is true that everything has already been invented, the way you see things, solve a problem, make an improvement on a service or a product, or tell a story - those are uniquely yours.
Sam Gilliam's groundbreaking invention of the drape painting revolutionized the world of contemporary art in the 1960s. Born in 1933 in Tupelo, Mississippi, Gilliam moved to Washington, DC in 1962, arriving when the proponents of Color Field painting were trying to figure out how to break away from Abstract Expressionism and leave their own mark on history.
Give Yourself the Challenge to Do Something Different
Sam Gilliam with the draped canvases in 1970.
Gilliam experimented with painting figures, but when he moved to DC, he changed his focus to abstraction and soaked in inspiration from artists like Kenneth Noland and Morris Lewis. Gilliam had been pondering how to move the needle in painting by making something completely different, and he deliberately gave this problem to his subconscious mind.
A confluence of circumstances showed up in Gilliam’s life in 1965, after months of looking for an insight. First, Rockne Krebs, an artist based in Washington, and an art professor of the latter, teased Gilliam “about having the paintings on the floor to paint them and not resolving them in terms of that. And that's where the drape paintings came from, sort of a solution of that.” Second, one day Gilliam looked outside the window of his studio and saw laundry hanging on clotheslines, swaying in a lyrical motion from the wind, and he connected the dots and saw with clarity what would be his own thing.
“I thought that in this way I would give myself at least a clear base and I'd discover something for myself.” With the simple act of staining yards and yards of canvas and liberating them from the stretcher bars, suspending them from ceilings and letting them fall in whatever ways they wanted, Gilliam started what would later become one of the most important contributions to contemporary art that any artist has ever made.
Gilliam became recognized as the first artist to introduce the idea of a draped, stained canvas hanging without a stretcher, representing a sculptural, third dimension in painting.
Go Where There’s a Return on Investment
Sam Gilliam, Seahorses (1975), acrylic on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Tunnel vision is the worst thing that can happen to an artist or an entrepreneur. It’s very good to have focus, but when the focus is so narrow that it doesn’t allow for options, then it becomes constriction.
Of course, curators and dealers began noticing Sam Gilliam’s drape paintings because they had never seen anything like them before. In 1972, he was chosen as the first African American to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale with an installation called Baroque Cascade that stretched over 75 feet before being hung from the rafters in the exhibition hall.
But soon Gilliam realized that commercially, the drapes weren’t that successful because collectors weren’t fully on board with the novelty of hanging something that didn’t have a specific way of falling and wasn’t surrounded by a frame.
That didn’t deter him, though, because there was a group of people who really wanted the drapes: the institutions. Gilliam realized this early on: “It turned out the real way of supporting myself was by doing commissions. I would make paintings, but we couldn't sell them, so I would roll them up. It became about doing works in spaces. There are eight major drapes titled Carousels. For the San Francisco Museum, I made Autumn Surf with 150 yards of 15-foot-wide polypropylene… We have done installations in Germany, Chile, Korea… I had drapes I could only show in certain buildings and sites. It was just as interesting to ship a roll of fabric and fly there.”
Forty-five years after Gilliam first represented the US at the Venice Biennale, he returned in 2017 with his brilliantly colored unstretched canvas Yves Klein Blue (2017) that welcomed visitors to Giardini's main pavilion.
What Gilliam used in his favor was a clear sight of going where the money was.
Sometimes we are in our own way and become so stubborn and fixated with the way things should happen that we strangle the flow of business. All you need to do is turn in the direction of where the opportunities are and acknowledge that there are many ways to get to your desired goal.
Avoid Complacency
Sam Gilliam’s installation at the Marrakech Biennale in 2016.
It’s easy to stay complacent once you have found formulas that work and to churn products that repeat each other while saturating the market, believing that there’s always demand for more. But that’s not how Gilliam felt.
Gilliam was at the height of his popularity as the creator of draped canvases, but by the mid-1970s he suddenly discontinued producing them and instead began creating dynamic geometric collages influenced by musicians Miles Davis and John Coltrane. By 1977, Gilliam was producing "Black Paintings", similar in technique to the collage paintings, but predominantly in black hues. In 1979, Gilliam's “Wild Goose Chase” series was inaugurated and featured slanted edges and designs reminiscent of quilt patterns. He worked with paper, aluminum, plywood, acrylic and plastic.
In 2022, one month before his death at the age of 88, he debuted a series of tondo paintings in a solo show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. These were circular canvases in beveled frames containing fields of color, sometimes overflowing onto the frames themselves.
Sam Gilliam’s retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery in 2005.
The way that Gilliam operated in his lifetime is a testament of someone who wanted wholeheartedly to innovate, shift, keep things interesting. It wasn’t enough to create something new, but to keep building up on that newness through experiments and failures. That’s ultimately the true spirit of the entrepreneur - things are always in flux, and so should we be.
In a world that constantly evolves, complacency can be our greatest adversary. Embracing the desire to continually explore new horizons, learn, and innovate is the antidote to this lethargic state of being. As we navigate the ever-shifting tides, we should nurture this restless curiosity and refuse to settle for the comfort of the familiar. You will not only unlock your full potential but also contribute to the inexhaustible wellspring of human progress.
Like Gilliam offered: “If you are concerned about whatever it is you want to do, you dream about it. You wake up in the morning and you've got a solution. You work it out. There is always tomorrow.”
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