The Groove Issue 112 - Why Deepening Your Connections Increases Your Creativity
WHY DEEPENING YOUR CONNECTIONS INCREASES YOUR CREATIVITY
Creation is an emotional endeavor. We can feel all sorts of emotions from looking at a sunset or admiring a beautiful object, but the strongest emotions come from a place of connection with other human beings.
The best creative works make us feel something and the making of those in turn involve lots of underlying cords of human connection.
From the design of the iPhone to an entire Dior couture runway collection, meaningful creative undertakings require a lot of deep human interactions.
As we rely more and more on technology, screens, and isolation, our close contact with others, a very crucial aspect of creativity, has been dangerously eroded.
Showing Other People’s Worlds
Andrew Wyeth in his Cushing, Maine studio in 1951.
Being able to intently learn and absorb new things from other people’s worlds is not only the best antidote against self-absorption but also an endless source of different ideas and possibilities.
This type of close contact with others was at the core of Andrew Wyeth’s practice. “The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models... I have to become enamored. Smitten…”
In the 1940s, at a time when being a nonrepresentational painter was the hot and relevant thing to do, Wyeth doubled down on his passion to make realistic paintings, very much against the exciting and new riotous abstract expressionists of New York.
Not only did he choose mediums that were considered less important (he painted with watercolors, drybrush and egg tempera instead of using oil), but his colors were also muted and subdued when every other artist was using intense, vivid, eye-catching hues.
However, the magic in Wyeth’s work stemmed from the close relationships he had with his subjects.
The psychological and emotional portraiture that’s only possible when someone really cares about who they are painting and gets to know them well.
Andrew Wyeth, Christina’s World, 1948, tempera on panel.
One spring day in 1948, Wyeth peered out a window of a house in the town of Cushing in Maine, and saw his handicapped friend Christina Olson dragging herself across a field from her garden where she had been cultivating flowers. Christina had been crippled by a degenerative disease and refused to use a wheelchair in an act of defiance not to let anyone control her moves.
Wyeth knew Christina well and spent the entire summer working that image into a painting, which was shown later that year at the Macbeth Gallery in New York and immediately snapped by the Museum of Modern Art for $1,800. During the ensuing eight decades, the painting has become a MoMA highlight and is very rarely loaned to any other institution.
It was the intensity of the emotional connection, what Wyeth knew from being close to the model, that made ''Christina's World'' become one of the most recognizable artworks ever, an image embedded in popular iconography and in people’s minds and hearts.
Getting Lost In People’s Lives
The cover of Time Magazine on August 18, 1986 with one of the Helga paintings.
The more you forge genuine bonds with your clients, audience or teammates, the more relevant you become to them. And what you learn from others when you immerse yourself in their worlds stretches and expands your creativity in ways that nothing else can.
Human interactions build empathy, but as we connect with others we also reveal more of ourselves. Our own vulnerability is shown through our work and actions, making what we do more interesting and unique.
When Wyeth said “I get lost in my models’ lives and personalities,” he actually meant it.
In 1985, the artist shocked the world, including his own wife, when he revealed that for 15 years he had been secretly painting model Helga Testorf (a German woman who worked in Wyeth’s neighbor’s house). More than 240 works including sketches, watercolors, studies, drawings, drybrush paintings and temperas comprised the body of work.
A year after the big reveal, Leonard E. B. Andrews, a publishing businessman and art collector bought all 240 “Helga Pictures” directly from Wyeth for $5.5 million. He hyped the whole thing up (not that it wasn’t already a big attention magnet) by getting the works a much maligned yet massive historical show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC that then went on a nationwide tour.
While both Wyeth and Testorf denied a physical affair, their bond was undeniable and this close emotional peg was palpable in all the works. Wyeth’s marriage survived the secret; two paintings appeared on the cover of both Time Magazine and Newsweek, and in 1989, Andrews sold the entire collection again to a consortium of Japanese collectors for $40 million (almost $100 million today).
Why did people, from collectors to curators, have such an intense fascination for Wyeth’s work? Because he had been able to translate the quality of his honest emotional ties to the subjects into his art and to transmit it to others as well.
Borrowing a page from Wyeth’s playbook, one way to increase our creativity and enhance and improve our human interactions is by intently meeting with people in real life and caring about who they are.
If possible, ditch the zoom meeting and find ways to meet in person. Leave the small talk behind and ask interesting questions. Listen with undivided attention. All of these open yourself up to more satisfying relationships, exposing you to deeper emotional experiences and greater creativity.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members of my online course, Jumpstart.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
I am super thrilled that my book won the International Book Award in the Business/Entrepreneurship category!
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook.
TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.