The Groove Issue 55 - Four Ways to Spark Your Creativity by Weaving The Unexpected
FOUR WAYS TO SPARK YOUR CREATIVITY BY WEAVING THE UNEXPECTED
Creative products, companies, artworks, books or scientific breakthroughs often come from the mix of two or more disparate disciplines or areas of interest that come together to create something new and unexpected.
These amalgamations are where so much of the innovation process resides. Yet so many people insist in their hyperspecialized approaches to problem-solving with usually less-than-satisfactory results.
Let’s dive in to see how some remarkable people have mixed multiple disciplines with extraordinary outcomes.
Merge Many Interests
Remedios Varo in Mexico City in 1956.
Remedios Varo is considered one of the most important surrealist painters of the 20th century, but she isn’t that well-known in the United States. Last week The New York Times honored her in the “overlooked” section of important figures who died and didn’t get a proper obituary, and I immediately thought of the moments when I’ve seen her work in person and how fascinated and engulfed I was by it.
Varo was an exceptionally talented and successful artist interested in tarot, astrology and alchemy, which she balanced with a rigorous and lifelong love of science, particularly geology. Her drawings and paintings fused these interests.
She was trying to find the intersection between the mystical and the scientific and that’s what made her work so enticing. And it is now sought after -the last time one of her paintings was at auction this past June 2020, it sold for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s.
Years after her untimely death at the age of 54, she found fans in the scientific community as much as she did in the art world.
Use a Compelling Mix of Opposites
Remedios Varo, Celestial Pablum, 1958, oil on Masonite.
The late Alan J. Friedman, a physicist who for many years was the director of the New York Hall of Science, often spoke of how much inspiration Varo’s work brought to scientists and engineers. As he said, “she conveyed the most profound and creative moments in a scientist's life, when the researcher first dares to imagine an alternate universe, a model of how things work that differs radically from the models preceding it.”
The appeal of her work resides in the uniqueness of presenting this core moment of discovery so enticing for a researcher who realizes that the act of imagination in science is very similar to what artists do.
Remedios Varo, Harmony (Self-Portrait), oil on Masonite, 1956.
Since she was a child, Varo fueled her interests by reading science fiction and adventure books, like Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne. She also moved a lot around Spain and North Africa, and as an adult, to France, Venezuela, and Mexico where she spent the rest of her life.
She worked as a scientific researcher for public health organizations that hired her to produce drawings of bacteria and companies like Bayer where she illustrated ads for their products.
Her belief in mystical forces greatly influenced her paintings, but she was aware of the importance of biology, chemistry, physics and botany, and thought it should blend together with other aspects of life.
Her fascination for science, from Einstein’s theory of relativity and Darwinian evolution, to the ideas of Carl Jung, sacred geometry, and the I Ching all showed up in her art.
Explore The Boundaries Where Two Disciplines Meet
Of course, this mix of disparate disciplines doesn’t just belong to artists.
Paul Nurse, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2001, has said that part of his ability to see a broader perspective in his work comes from reading a wide source of materials and not just his local newspapers or articles that cover his area of expertise.
He is always looking to expand outside the topics that interest him, which often reveals unexpected links.
While Nurse is a geneticist, his co-laureate Tim Hunt is a biochemist and their very different backgrounds meant that their conversations were always stimulating and consistently productive and conducive to discovering something new.
To him, creativity lives within the boundaries between disciplines. It is about putting new things together and “exploring the edges”.
Look For the Surprising In Contrasting Elements
Ferran Adrià, the famed chef who was the head of El Bulli from 1986 until he decided to close the restaurant in 2011 and for decades was considered one of the best in the world, developed more than 1,800 recipes that melded haute cuisine, art and science.
Adrià is famous for his “culinary foam” without the addition of cream or egg white and freeze-drying or freezing with liquid nitrogen which were a part of his repertoire of innovations.
People paid whatever it was and stayed years on waitlists to go to this institution, because the inventiveness of the food came from mixing together all these other disciplines that were not common in the kitchen at that time and couldn’t be found anywhere else.
As a good inquisitive embracing both the creative and business parts of El Bulli, Adrià dedicated 20% of the restaurant’s annual budget to research and development.
The takeaway from these creatives is that if you want to disrupt, top your competitors, or contribute something new, you need to be willing to explore the connecting areas that could be perceived as outlandish or that don’t come together easily. That’s one of your best bets to strike gold.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
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THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
The 4 energies of the creative person: blissed, blessed, pissed and dissed.
Former Google top dog says that the AI revolution will be bigger than the Scientific Revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, and the triple revolution with the internet, smartphones, and social media.
Can the rise in publishing of the “smart thinking” book, an elevated species of self-help for the aspiring ratiocinator, really give you an edge?
TikTok hits the big time: The MLA Handbook has decided how to cite it in academic works.
Distraction is tempting — perhaps for some, even addicting — but the research is clear: creativity emerges from full engagement in what you are doing.
Best art exhibition I saw in NYC last week.
NFTs are here to stay. Sales volumes surged to $10.7 billion in the third quarter of 2021, up more than eightfold from the previous quarter.