The Groove Issue 124 - How to Get a Breakthrough
HOW TO GET A BREAKTHROUGH
If you’ve ever felt trapped by current circumstances, unable to figure out how to do something new or find solutions to a recurring problem, you may have prayed for a breakthrough.
Every day, humans in all different fields bend reality and what once seemed impossible becomes certain: sports records are broken and new ones established, miracle drugs and treatments save or prolong lives and emerging technologies make our lives easier.
The point where an idea becomes an innovation is usually a breakthrough: a sudden increase in knowledge or an important discovery that happens after trying for a long time to understand or explain something.
You don’t have to find the cure to cancer to get to your own personal breakthrough, but when a breakthrough happens it will unveil itself to you the way it happened to Romare Bearden.
Have a Burning Desire to Sharpen Your Skills Daily
Romare Bearden in his studio in New York, 1972.
Feeble efforts produce feeble results. The greatest leaders and most innovative people in history know that you never stop learning, whether that comes from reading books and putting what you absorb into action, or by practicing your craft daily and adding new moves constantly in your chosen field.
Bearden was born in 1912 in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was of Cherokee, Italian, and African descent and both of his parents were African American.
While growing up in Harlem after he and his family moved to New York, his mother was opposed to Bearden becoming an artist because of the uncertainty of the Great Depression. Nevertheless, he studied art, education, science, and math, graduating with a degree in science and education from NYU in 1935.
After working as a cartoonist, Bearden had the presence of mind to acknowledge that he didn’t know that much about painting, that he hadn’t gone to art school long enough.
He found his own solution to this dilemma: “I had read Delacroix's Journal and I noted how Delacroix almost to the end of his life was always going to the Louvre and copying paintings. I felt that I wanted to do the same thing so I took perhaps two years and made a very systematic study of the old masters.”
Bearden didn’t necessarily need to go to the museums. Predating the internet where these images are everywhere, he gathered from books images of the Old Masters that he was interested in, enlarged them by photostat and copied them in his own way. Every day, he’d sharpen his skills and expanded his scope without even having to move from his studio. The prerequisite: he had a burning desire to get better at what he did.
Move Past Self-Sabotage
The Street, 1964, photostat on board was one of the first “Projections” by Romare Bearden and the breakthrough to his subsequent success.
“Resistance by definition is self-sabotage,” wrote Steven Pressfield in his mega-bestselling book The War of Art. Sometimes we are really good at something, and we resist our own talents because they don’t necessarily come easy to us.
You have to be careful of those times when things are going well, because consciously or unconsciously, you can self-sabotage your success. The simple act of being aware of this insidious pattern is enough to give you a clear perception of when you may want to run away from your path.
In the 1940s, Bearden had several successful exhibitions with paintings in a semi-abstract style and in 1950 he had an opportunity to move to Paris to study art history at the Sorbonne. While in Paris, something happened: Bearden stopped painting, though he was surrounded by successful artists, even meeting Pablo Picasso and becoming good friends with Constantin Brancusi.
Upon his return to New York two years later, perhaps in an act of defiance against his own gifts, or maybe thinking he could never become like the artists he met in France, Bearden declared that he’d become a songwriter. As the Renaissance Man that he was, he wrote and produced more than 20 songs, and a couple of them even became hits. But one night, philosophers Heinrich Blucher and his wife Hannah Arendt invited Bearden to their home and told him: “You're wasting your life. In the first place, you don't even believe in what you're doing.”
Romare Bearden, Empress of the Blues, 1974, acrylic and pencil on paper and printed paper.
These words stung like venom and Bearden sobered up from his Parisian drunkenness and went back to his studio, even though in his own words: “painting is so difficult; the canvas was always saying no to me.”
There’s a myth that has been erroneously perpetuated, which says that if you are good at something then it should come easily to you. Yes, sometimes that happens, but for each person whose talents flow with ease and grace, there are five who will be struggling to get things done no matter how good they are at them. This is what Bearden was grappling with.
And this is more common that you’d know. For example, when you think about why someone like Daniel Day-Lewis, brimming with fame and wealth, announced his retirement in 2017 after being the only male actor who had won three Oscars for best performance and being celebrated across the board as one of the finest actors of the 21st century, you understand that even though he was exceptionally good, acting at this level wasn’t easy for him.
Stay The Course
Romare Bearden, Mother and Child, 1971, Screenprint in colors and offset lithograph.
A lot of people quit before the miracle. But not Bearden. After he made peace with the idea that he’d work as an artist for the rest of his life, he started playing with collages in 1963. And this is how the breakthrough happened.
He started pasting magazine cutouts and photos of the people of Harlem and its streets mixed with landscapes, animals and African sculptures on regular sheets of paper. A friend saw them, loved them, and suggested that these sheets be photographed and blown up the same way Bearden had done earlier with reproductions of the Old Masters. The artist did it, but at first the results did not particularly interest him. The large photomontages were rolled up in a corner of his studio when gallery owner Arne Ekstrom came there early in 1964 to discuss Bearden's next New York exhibition, scheduled for the fall.
Ekstrom was lukewarm about Bearden’s newer abstract paintings, and when he was about to leave, he asked what was in those rolls. When he saw the photomontages, he became speechless and exhilarated at the same time. That was Bearden’s next show.
The "Projections," as Bearden and Ekstrom agreed to call them because they felt cinematic, were an instant commercial and critical success. People started categorizing him as the artist who had reinvented collage, the ideal medium for the transmission of all he had learned as an artist and as a man. They were true aesthetic and emotional breakthroughs, others said.
These were really prints. Each was issued in an edition of six, and sales were very encouraging to the extent that after 1964, everything Bearden did was rooted in collage. But then he wanted to work directly on the surface, not through prints, so he began making paintings on Masonite panels to avoid warping after he glued the images on top.
When asked about his breakthrough, Bearden said: “any artist has this desire for a vision of the world and you have something. There's some painting someplace that's not in a museum and it's your idea as a painter to put that one thing that is missing there.” This idea translates equally to any field: there’s something that only you can make that is missing in this world. Something nobody else is doing.
Bearden had a wildly successful career because of these collages, which gave his practice a new dimension. Right after the 1964 show in New York, he was invited to do a solo exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which heightened his public profile. In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work, which traveled to the University Art Museum in Berkeley, California. Solo and group shows, book writing and print-production kept Bearden busy, relevant, and rich.
By the time of his death in 1988, Bearden’s works had been acquired by every major museum in the United States, and he had been awarded the National Medal of Arts and was considered the “nation’s foremost collagist”.
Not everyone will get to a breakthrough in the same way Bearden did, but it’s worth considering that these three steps are usually present in the gestation of a quantum leap, regardless of the industry you are in. It doesn’t matter the phase you are in right now, it’s never too late to aim for a breakthrough.
SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
Speaking of breakthroughs, I must say that the members of my online course and inner circle, Jumpstart, never fail to amaze me during our monthly Zoom meetings.
In the last call, these are a few things that some of the participants shared as breakthroughs encouraged by what they have learned in the course and the calls:
A Southern artist manifested a solo museum show
An entrepreneur is about to launch a café and comedy lounge
A New York photographer got invited to teach a course in Iceland
And that was just a sample of what was shared in January’s session.
Every month I hear more amazing results from the people in this community.
Next Monday, February 13, Jumpstart’s price will go up.
I’ve put together a free webinar for those of you who are not members.
If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
But if you are ready to enroll now, you can do so here.
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
My book was chosen by the Next Big Idea Club as one of the top books of creativity of 2022!
Have you gotten yours yet? If you enjoy this newsletter you will love my book!
How Creativity Rules The World is filled with practical tools that will propel and guide you to help you get any project from an idea to a concrete reality.
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.