During the Christmas Break, I started reading a few biographies.
I love biographies. I like stories about real people, real situations, and facts. I like them because, contrary to schoolboy belief, memories and biographies and histories, in general, are very exciting.
The account of a real life can be filled with adventures that we may never encounter in our own personal experiences. Of the three biographies I have been reading, the one about the artist Lucian Freud is the most compelling. It reminded me of something I discussed with Jamie Lin once.
He told me that artists and entrepreneurs have a lot in common. Being an artist myself, I know a little about what this means, but to go on about it for thousands of words will likely bore you, so I will just focus on one element of it.
Let me first start with a quote from Freud, who, yes, was the grandson of the late psychologist Sigmund Freud, though profoundly more artistically inclined.
"The fact of your life being your subject matter doesn’t in any way change the nature of art or artistic enterprise. And therefore it seems absolutely obvious, as well as convenient, to use as a subject what you are thinking and looking at all the time — the way your life goes.”
Artists are experts in the logical pursuit and maybe even the dissection of irrational facts of life. They take this observation and they articulate it in such a way that it presents to the audience a newly envisioned life, that is so detailed and so crafted that it entices us to think and to possibly even live in a new way.
If you even slightly doubt this, look at any of the pieces of impressionist art which are famous for being able to not only depict a scene of life, but to also depict the way in which the scene is seen. Look at pointillism. Look at the frightful and pitiful sculpture work of Giacometti.
All in all, this is to say that art is the action of becoming something new through observation and visual presentation. And to create such a thing requires significant work.
And here is the similarity between artists and founders. Really great founders are perhaps the best at acute observation of human nature. They take those observations and through trial and error, and injecting a little of the uncertainty of creation, they present to us, the consumer, a new WAY of doing something.
It does not happen slap dash, or haphazardly. It happens DELIBERATELY. Despite how irrational and illogical a new thing appears to be, that new thing came into being through the logical action of pairing creativity or imagination with, one might say, the biography of the consumer. So that it fits into that life in such a way that in a short time, or over a lifetime, it simply becomes as necessary to life as breathing.
Thank you for indulging my love of art and startups in this post. Please search the web for images of Freud's work, or any of the art I mentioned here. I am including one, which, as part of a collection in the UK's Royal Academy of Art, has common use rights, and can be freely circulated.
Spend a few moments looking at it. The one thing I will note about the portrait is that, as it is a portrait of the artist by the artist himself, the eyes seem to be missing. They seem to be chiseled into a squint, almost as if shaped out of mountain or rock. To me, this is the story of the artist. Work that over time shapes the ability to see and make the work -- a talent that is critical and permanent, and created as if it is a force of nature itself.
If you are a founder, ask yourself if you are also creating deliberately, and fashioning out of a passion for reality a new reality. Of being, in that reality.
This is not easy to do. This is a life's work. It never stops. But it also has the force of nature.
Doug Crets
Communications Master, AppWorks Accelerator
Image: Lucian Freud by Lucian Freud, Royal Academy of Arts
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