The Groove Issue 95 - Why You Should Seek Harmony In Contradiction
WHY YOU SHOULD SEEK HARMONY IN CONTRADICTIONS
One of the reasons I launched The Groove and wrote How Creativity Rules The World was to help bring more interdisciplinary thinking to people in different fields. For artists to embrace more of their inner entrepreneur and for businesspeople to think more like artists.
Why I look at history is not to repeat what has been already done, but to borrow concepts that have withstood the passage of time. So many books and articles are filled with “cutting edge” and “of-the-last-minute” information that will become irrelevant and obsolete in a few years at most.
Mythologies such as “only artists are creative” or “there’s nothing for other disciplines to learn from the arts” is a series of fallacies that only hurt those who believe in them.
The world is slowly coming to terms with the evidence that narrow-thinking, hyper specializations and zero-sum mentalities are not conducive to creative thinking. As I’ve said here and elsewhere many times: there’s no progress without creativity.
The synergies between fields that seem far apart, like math, science, and visual arts, are usually ripe for multiple contributions. Georges Seurat is the perfect example of this.
Breaking Down to Add Up
Georges Seurat in Paris in 1888.
A Sunday Afternoon on The Island of La Grande Jatte (1884-1886) is one of the most iconic artworks of the 19th century. It altered the course of art history because it launched Neo-Impressionism, a movement that aimed to interpret lines and colors through science.
Seurat was into the study of things that others thought incompatible: art and beauty juxtaposed against math, science, and logical abstraction.
He was deeply influenced by Michael Chevreul, a French chemist who was named “director of the dye” of the Gobelins (the most famous tapestry factory in France, still in operation and run by the French government), and who had written extensively about the perception of colors when placed next to contrasting or complementary ones.
Such was Seurat’s desire to mix what was considered as insoluble as water and oil that he wrote: “Some say they see poetry in my paintings; I see only science.”
Find Harmony in the Analogy of Contraries
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886, oil on canvas.
After much research on optical illusions and perception, Seurat began a new experiment: to break down colors of oil paint on the canvas to what he thought was the smallest particle available to him, juxtaposed dots, which instead of blending on the canvas, did so in the eye of the viewer, thus creating more luminosity.
It took 60 studies and two years for Seurat to finish La Grande Jatte, culminating with a breakthrough masterpiece fully conceived as a scientific approach to painting.
In a letter to the writer Maurice Beaubourg in 1890, Seurat wrote: "Art is Harmony. Harmony is the analogy of the contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line.” He theorized that the scientific application of color was like any other natural law, and he was driven to prove his hypothesis.
Several years later, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would study Seurat’s work using his ideas of small pieces broken apart as one of the foundations to Cubism.
Twenty years after La Grande Jatte, Shinobunu Ishihara invented the plates that are still used today to diagnose color blindness, much inspired by Seurat’s approach. Seventy years later, pointillism would influence the concept of the pixel as the smallest single component of a digital image.
Seurat was a master of tricking the eye with pointillism. 130 years after he painted Young Woman Powdering Herself (right) experts at the Courtauld Gallery in London using advanced imaging technology have found that Seurat painted a self-portrait before covering it up with the flowers (left).
Is Business Still “As Usual”?
Nothing is as it used to be. We know that the future arrives way faster than we expect it.
Harvey White, one of the co-founders of multibillion dollar companies Qualcomm and Leap Wireless International, has been advocating for more than a decade for a transformation of the American public education system and the workforce as we know it.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, White used to think the best engineers he could hire were those who had pure mathematical backgrounds and hyper-focused scientific minds. But later he reflected on his mistake and said that all the engineers needed art classes, because otherwise they wouldn’t be as creative and innovative as the new world demanded.
“What concerns me is people don’t understand that the marriage of arts and humanities with engineering is an economic issue. It’s not just a nicety… ” Harvey said in an interview in 2012.
As you’ve probably seen in the last 10 years since Harvey’s words, they aren’t only an accurate statement but an urgent one that should be implemented across schools, companies, and governments around the world. Yet, art programs still remain the first to go with budget cuts.
Our problems transcend disciplines and require flexible solutions that can come from any field. Imagine how many more things could be done, invented, and discovered if it weren’t for people’s rigidity?
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 is 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!
Have you already gotten your copy?
It’s in three formats: hardcover, eBook and audiobook. Get it here.
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.