The Groove Issue 71 - Reclaim The Most Overlooked Aspect of Creativity
RECLAIM THE MOST OVERLOOKED ASPECT OF CREATIVITY
One of the most overlooked aspects of creativity is asserting your autonomy.
In a world where groupthink, keeping up with the Joneses, media manipulation, critics who don’t get your ideas and many other obstacles drown your individuality, autonomy is needed now more than it ever was.
Today, I’m giving you a tight excerpt of my upcoming book “How Creativity Rules The World: The Art and Business of Turning Your Ideas Into Gold” (HarperCollins).
I have condensed an 11-page chapter into a handful of paragraphs below.
At the end of every chapter, there is an Alchemy Lab section so you can take actionable steps from what you’ve learned in that chapter and adapt them to your life.
I have cut in half the Alchemy Lab in that chapter (I want you to read the whole book!) so you have an opportunity to think through these prompts until the book arrives.
How Artemisia Gentileschi’s Defied All Odds with Her Autonomy
Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 1615–1617 by the Italian Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
Back in 1610, women weren’t autonomous. They were expected to marry young and bear children. Women who wanted to become artists could not study anatomy or life drawing. As a young girl, Artemisia Gentileschi learned how to draw, mix color, and paint. Her father, Orazio, was an accomplished Roman painter. He encouraged her artistic talent and let her play in his studio and hang out with other artists.
In 1610, seventeen-year-old Artemisia finished her first major work, Susanna and the Elders, a scene from the book of Daniel in the Old Testament. This painting, showing Artemisia’s phenomenal talent, prompted her father to hire another painter, Agostino Tassi, to privately tutor his daughter. Tassi raped her and, with the false promise of marriage, lured her into a continuing sexual relationship. Artemisia eventually told her dad, who pressed charges against Tassi.
In a public and humiliating trial, nineteen-year-old Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews (a barbaric precursor of a lie detector test) to assess the veracity of her testimony. Tassi was convicted, although he never served his sentence.
Susanna and The Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, 1610.
After all that Artemisia had gone through, she didn’t hide or resign herself to a life of misery. She married an older man, moved to Florence, had four children, and pursued her ambition to become a famous and well-paid artist.
She never again painted a woman looking like Susanna, a victim of men. Artemisia determined she would be thought the equal or better than any of her male counterparts. Her creativity soared in tandem with her skill and fame.
Throughout her forty-year career, she painted many heroic women nude or in sumptuous dresses that revealed ample décolletages and tight cleavages, including Cleopatra, Venus, Danaë, and Mary Magdalene, charged with eroticism and orgasmic facial expressions.
She became friends with influential people like Galileo Galilei; took commissions from princes, kings, cardinals, and dukes; traveled to different cities in and outside Italy; and became the first woman accepted as a member of the prestigious Accademia del Disegno in Florence.
She was the headliner, the earner, and the leader in control. Had Artemisia been alive today, her life might look like a Quentin Tarantino movie: an avenging heroine marked by crime and violence, absurd situations, dark humor, wittiness, and, ultimately, triumph.
Creativity Thrives on Pushbacks
The lid of one of Madame CJ Walker’s products which led her to substantial wealth in the early 1900s.
Given the circumstances of her life, I can’t think of a more autonomous and independent entrepreneur than Madam C. J. Walker, whose creativity and innovation took her from extreme poverty to substantial wealth.
Born Sarah Breedlove in 1867 in Delta, Louisiana, to slave parents who worked in cotton fields, she was lucky enough to have come into this world after the Emancipation Proclamation. As many rural Americans in the late nineteenth century did, Madam grew up without indoor plumbing and proper hair hygiene. Consequently, she started going bald and always covered her head with a wrap. She was adamant about finding a solution, and eventually formulated a product that she said “came to her in a dream.”
As soon as she made some money, she reinvested it in newspaper ads with her own “before and after” pictures, which helped her build a mail-order business. She added shampoo and a pressed oil to her product offerings, and opened a parlor to demonstrate the benefits of her mixes. Madam had almost no formal education, but her gift was palpable. She realized that she could train others and recruit them as commissioned sales agents of her products, thus expanding her reach and sales exponentially.
She networked relentlessly with pastors, members of the church, and Black community organizers. She realized she had to do this all over the country, and embarked on long tours that involved meeting Baptist church leaders, churchgoers, and anyone else who could spread the word about her transformational hair treatments.
In 1913, she purchased a large townhouse and opened a salon in Harlem when it was becoming the center of African American culture.
Her best and most creative business strategy was to autonomously do what she thought best, even in the face of cultural and racial pushback. She recruited and trained twenty thousand sales agents throughout the two decades she was at the helm of her company, and the novel way in which she organized them set her and her business apart.
By the time of her death in 1919, Madam’s personal net worth was close to $600,000, which translates to almost $9 million as of this writing.
The trick of successful artists and entrepreneurs is to know how to self-regulate, maintaining that fine balance of autonomy with the discipline to get things done.
Excessive freedom leads to lack of attention and repeated effort that dilutes concentration and focus. Parameters, structures, and routines counterbalance autonomy.
Alchemy Lab
Being autonomous doesn’t mean working in isolation or disconnecting from the rest of the world. Practice independent thinking and foster your autonomy by following these steps:
1. Question the status quo, processes, products, systems, authoritarian models, and/or information coming from media sources that don’t offer an alternative point of view.
2. Hold an internal debate with yourself on a divisive topic. Balance all the options, benefits, and disadvantages that might come from choosing an unpopular idea that you believe in.
3. Take the road less traveled. Creativity and innovation don’t spurt out of “business as usual.” When everyone zigs, you zag.
Thank you again for the incredible response to my book!
Preorder it from Amazon, B&N or your favorite independent bookstore and claim FREE immediate access to my creativity online course broken down in practical modules, videos and PDFs to go at your own pace.
You also gain access to the monthly group Zoom calls which are priceless!
This program is guaranteed to spark a creative breakthrough in you, no matter what you do. Now for a limited time, you can get it during the preorder phase of my book at no cost.
Read the many breakthroughs that past participants have experienced here.
All you have to do is send your purchase confirmation to book@mariabrito.com and you will be in.
All details are here.
I was a guest of the phenomenal Pam Covarrubias on her super popular podcast, Café con Pam recounting how I left my country, then quit my career as a corporate attorney and built my art advisory from scratch. We also talked about choosing joy over a safe and predictable path, my upcoming book and so much more. Listen here.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.
There are no affiliate links in this email. Everything that I recommend is done freely.
THE CURATED GROOVE
A selection of interesting articles in business, art and creativity along with some other things worth mentioning:
Why Supporting Women in Business Is Essential for Innovation.
How Creativity Powered Cirque Du Soleil Amid Covid-19.
4 ways leaders can proactively fuel creativity.
Toward a “new and improved” understanding of corporate innovation programs.
Science and artistic creativity are very similar.