The Groove Issue 60 - Why Developing Your Intuition Is Crucial For Creativity
WHY DEVELOPING YOUR INTUITION IS CRUCIAL FOR CREATIVITY
Every successful artist and entrepreneur uses their intuition to their advantage, whether consciously or unconsciously.
Scientists have attempted to explain the concept of intuition as “the spontaneous integration of previously learned responses''. While science is always trying to prove something empirically, having a sixth sense and trusting it can hardly be explained by data.
For something to be creative, it has to be original (as in not seen before) and relevant (as in providing value).
But you also know that nothing is 100% original - the “originality” comes in the integration, on how those parts are put together. Intuition often guides this integration process.
How Intuition Guided the Career of Henri Rousseau
Henri Rousseau in Paris in 1907.
While intuition is innate and belongs to every human being, your personal attitude also helps in its development.
Henri Rousseau was a Parisian toll-and-tax collector who had a formal education, but not as a painter. He didn’t know the rules of depth and perspective, of composition, of color.
He was a self-taught Sunday painter who possessed something a whole lot more powerful than an art school diploma: his intuition.
Sumptuous jungles, lush greenery, fantastical narratives - Rousseau was painting from intuition and anticipating the surrealist movement for more than 25 years.
He relied so much on his gut that he often said, “I felt before I thought”.
Henri Rousseau, Myself: Portrait – Landscape, oil on canvas, 1890. He claimed to have invented the “portrait landscape” genre.
He started painting seriously in 1886 when he was in his 40s, and by the time he was 49 he had retired from his day job to paint full time.
Never confined to a subject matter, he tackled portraits, landscapes, historical scenes, still lifes and cityscapes. He also claimed to have invented the portrait-landscape as a genre.
Rousseau’s paintings don’t fit cubism, or the avant garde of his time, and they don’t look like anything that had been done before either. How did he do that? He was guided by instinct.
Keeping a Child-Like Outlook
The Dream is one of Rousseau’s most iconic paintings. Finished in 1910, French art dealer Ambroise Vollard bought it from Rousseau the same year. Years later, it was sold through Knoedler Galleries in New York to clothing manufacturer and art collector Sidney Janis in January 1934. Janis sold the painting to Nelson A. Rockefeller in 1954, who donated it to the Museum of Modern Art where it remains on display.
Young children are extremely intuitive and because of that, they are also incredibly creative.
They haven’t yet been exposed to formal education, media, or a greater number of people who tend to say “no” to their outlandish ideas. Kids are honest and willing to express their minds, no matter what.
Rousseau did what many artists try and often fail at: he kept the gaze of a child but invented the language of a sophisticated artist.
Similarly, when the critics reviewed Rousseau’s work, the words “curious”, “sincere” and “naive” showed up frequently and those same words were used to describe his personality.
His inspiration came to him while listening to the stories of soldiers who had survived expeditions to exotic places like Mexico, or while visiting the botanical gardens in Paris. He was mindfully taking it all in, and letting his intuition connect those experiences and translate them into his work.
For those who knew Rousseau, including Wassily Kandinsky, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, and Pablo Picasso, all of whom collected his paintings, they all agreed that his spirit and demeanor always exuded a perennial youth, which kept him intuitive and child-like until the end of his life.
Rousseau’s work has influenced hundreds of thousands of artists for a century and a half -- it has also been the inspiration behind DreamWorks’ 2005 animated movie “Madagascar” and last week Meta (formerly Facebook) launched its first ad based on his 1908 painting “The Tiger & The Buffalo”.
Why Intuition Is the Cornerstone of Entrepreneurship
Being a relative blank canvas in a new business is deeply intertwined with intuition because it helps drown that voice that tells you: “That’s not possible” or “Warning! You will fail!”
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs in history start businesses in areas they don’t have expertise in but rely on their intuition to guide them.
Steve Jobs wasn’t a coder nor a computer scientist, much less a designer, but he listened to his intuition all the time, a habit he said was nurtured by his daily practice of Zen meditation.
Richard Branson didn’t have any experience in the business of airlines, hotels, or telecoms, but he followed his instincts in building his vision and what started as a mail-order record company grew into a multibillion conglomerate.
Branson has said that: “I’ve always relied on instinct when it comes to calculating risks… maybe the finances all add up, and the graphs are in the green, but if it doesn’t feel right – it’s worth exploring those feelings and remaining willing to take risks.”
The ability to make decisions quickly can be also equated with “street smarts”: you are less concerned with knowing every detail and fact, but make your moves based on your gut.
Even though you may not have all the pieces of the puzzle, you arrive at the correct solution for the problem or the project in front of you. That is the realm of possibility but also of intuition.
Like Rousseau, Jobs or Branson did, develop your intuition by leaving all your preconceptions, the “shoulda coulda woulda” assumptions and the “can’t do” statements at the door.
Since intuition operates without previous knowledge, it opens up the door for freshness of the imagination and also a child-like vision of what’s possible. And when that signal rings loud in your gut, listen to it.
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:
Creating hypotheses has long been a purely human domain. Now, though, scientists are beginning to ask if AI can do a better job?
How Shonda Rhimes is building Shondaland into a media powerhouse.
In a first move, a museum opens its entire collection and becomes the only fully accessible public depot that is open in the world.
Why “mistakes” in language are actually progress.
How to raise a creative child – who’s also happy, empathetic and imaginative.
Best exhibition I saw in NYC last week