My background is in engineering. I went to school for petroleum engineering. I loved math throughout high school. Differential equations was, hands down, my favorite course that I took in college. Although that’s owed as much to the professor as it is the material (shoutout to Nestor Handzy at the Penn State University and the profound impact that you had on my life that you probably don’t even realize).
But then I dropped out of college in the final hour (a story for another time), and picked up a camera, I know… pretty random. All of a sudden my left and right brain were at odds with one another. I found myself in the midst of an identity crisis; “I’m not a creative person… I’m a left brained, logical thinking, math loving, engineer type. I don’t make art with cameras. I make discoveries with numbers. Right brain… creativity… what’s that?”
As a kid, I really enjoyed drawing, but I never drew anything original. I enjoyed the meticulous process of looking at things that other people had drawn and copying that. Not tracing, actually legitimately drawing it free handed, but the concept belonged to someone else. I didn’t create something from nothing, I enjoyed the equation, the emulation. I liked seeing if I could reproduce the incredible work that others had put in the heavy, right brained, lifting to come up with.
Math is the study of patterns. And I was into seeing if I could pattern what I was making off of what others had created. So even my creative endeavors could be reduced down to my logical brain.
One night, years after feverishly doodling away as a kid, after I had dropped out of college and started my business, while working late on a video edit I had a thought: Nothing is truly an original creation.
Up to that point, I had always struggled to see myself as creative person because I was just copying. If I drew an image of a Labrador retriever as a kid, I copied or modeled it off of someone else’s drawing of a Labrador retriever. How could that be creative, the idea wasn’t original? But then I realized, whoever drew the “original” may not have copied their drawing from someone else’s drawing, but they did model their drawing after an actual Labrador retriever — and call me crazy but a Labrador retriever was not the original creation of the artist.
The original artist didn’t create anything original, they simply emulated something familiar to all of us, a dog, onto a page.
So, what is originality? What is creativity? Is originality even necessary in the creation of something unique and artistic? If something is copied, is it any less creative? If so, does that make God the only real creative artist and the rest of us are a bunch of phonies? Well, kind of but that’s a unifying condition because none of us created the Earth as we know it so if it’s universally true for everyone then we can discard it for the sake of this conversation. So then what does being truly creative look like for mere mortals?
We often separate the right brain from the left brain. We separate “creative” people from “logical” people. And I’m not here to argue with science, there are very clear findings about the rolls that the right and left brain play in the type of thinking we do. But I think we, as naturally self-segregating human beings miss the mark when we start to pigeon hole people into thinking that they are predominantly one type of person or the other.
We tend to treat people like they can only be right brained or only be left brained. You’re either a creative or a logician. You either think in numbers or you think in pictures.
Well, I’m here to debunk this. I’m here to throw this thinking in the trash.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the creatives of the Renaissance. The same names that we attach to some of the greatest works of art to ever exist we also attach to some of the greatest scientific and mathematic realizations in history. The right brained artists aren’t just the same left-brained logicians who made these scientific discoveries, their art, their right brained, artistic, intuitive, imagination is what informed their left brained, logical, linear thinking, factual discoveries in math and science.
Their art, their curiosity of what could be inspired their discoveries of what was!
One of my favorite stories of this is Nicolaus Copernicus. Copernicus, if you don’t know, is largely credited with the discovery that the planet Earth is indeed not the center of the universe and that the Earth actually revolves around the sun.
Copernicus was painting fruit in a bowl, practicing his art, and observing light and shadow and the way it interacted with a round spherical object, the fruit, when he realized that in order for light to interact with the moon (also a spherical object) in the nature that it did, the earth must be revolving around the sun, creating the light and shadow on the moon that we can observe. Popular opinion, the only opinion which was regarded as fact to that point, said the opposite; that the sun revolved around the earth.
Now here’s one of my favorite parts, not only did Copernicus let hit right-brain artistic nature inform his left-brain scientific discovery, he feared releasing this discovery because he was scared that it would be rejected. It took him four years and a lot of coaxing before he finally presented his discovery to the world at large.
Now, if you’re somebody who creates for a living, you’ve probably struggled with the fear of releasing your work to the world. You play this thing in your head on loop of, “What if it’s not good enough, what if people don’t like it, what if I could make it better before putting it out there, what if… what if… what if…”
Nicolaus Copernicus played the what if game with his science for four years because it was driven by his art. Science is the art of observation. Did you catch it, I’ll say it again: science is the art of observation. In order to be qualified as scientific, it has to be observable and repeatable and there is a right-brained art form to being observant enough to recognize how things are interacting in the world and then developing experiments to repeat the phenomenon to prove it as universally true.
And yet, even though the reality that the earth revolves around the sun is both observable and experimentally repeatable, Copernicus struggled with the same fear, the same doubt, the same imposter syndrome that you and I do because science is art.
So what am I trying to say?
I’m trying to get you out of your head. I’m trying to get you to see that the world deserves to see your work, your work that matters. You owe it to the world to let your art, let your discovery, let your intuition inform and form the way that they interpret the world we live in. Your right-brain can not only inform your left brain it can inform the left brain of everyone who sees your work.
We’re talking about doing work that matters. It matters because it has the potential to have an impact. And then actually shipping that work. Shipping the work is what translates potential impact into actual impact. The world deserves the impact that your work will have on it!
I’ve been able to observe this in my career; I’m a filmmaker— sometimes I view other people’s work, who I know are great photographers and film makers and I struggle to get it. I don’t see what they were seeing when they created it. Which is totally fine! There’s a subjectivity to art and sometimes it’s just not for you or not for the season of life that you’re in. But there’s a photographer, his name is Alan Schaller, he’s probably my favorite photographer of all time, which is cool because he’s still alive and creating incredible images today. When I see Alan’s work, I’m instantly connected. I see Alan’s work and every single time I say, “I see it, I understand, I get it, I can see the vision, I can see the execution, and I completely appreciate this image.”
Alan shoots a lot of street photography and what I have started to see is that I view the world differently after discovering Alan’s work. There’s a very real science to how photographs and art and really anything man made in general are composed and how that affects the human brain and emotion; visual weight, balance, color, composition, light and shadow, etc. These are all things that have an impact on the brain and I begin to observe these things more in the real world after I view Alan’s art. I start to see my actual world through a lens that looks something like the lens Alan shoots his images through.
Alan’s art is affecting how I am seeing and interpreting the world which is in turn affecting how I feel; not just when I photograph things but when I’m taking a walk with my wife, or when I’m driving my car. I notice symmetry, and light and shadow, and balance, and all of these things. I have become observationally aware of things that I never would have considered prior to viewing Alan’s art because I see things in the real world that look like something that Alan would have taken an image of.
So our art connects us beyond the feeling we have when we see it. Everybody can look at a piece of art and feel something, even if that feeling is that they don’t like it. But I now see a world more similar to how Alan sees the world because I’m identifying visual interest that looks like what his art looks like. I’m identifying patterns (remember, math is the study of patterns) in the real world that Alan has emulated in his art and I connect with him on that level despite never having met him before.
And so we return to my example of a drawing of a Labrador retriever from when I was kid, I was emulating someone else’s work. I was patterning what I was doing off of what somebody had already done but in doing so, I was recognizing things that I had never observed before.
I was connected to the art in that context and it has impacted the way that I now view and interact with the world, years later. Maybe not just in isolation of that one drawing of a Labrador, but in my experience of emulating others work as a tactic, as a strategy, as a source of creating something, that has molded me in a unique way in how I interact with the world.
Back to the premise: is original idea real in the human world? Is there anything that is original at all? Maybe in the abstract, but we even interpret abstract art in realistic conceptualizations. We look at a painting that that has two simple, horizontal, parallel lines painted next to each other, a blue one and beneath it a tan one, and we say, “That looks like where the sand meets the water on the beach.” The abstraction is being connected to something we can all relate to. Something a lot of us have experienced before.
So I ask again, is anything truly unique or original?
What I’m trying to get you to question is this idea that something has to be totally original, never done before, in order for it to be worthy to be shared with the world. Arguably the most successful company in the world, Apple (you know I had to bring up this example), is not known for it’s ability to innovate new technology. It’s known for it’s ability to innovate and perfect existing technology. They pattern their work after things that have been done before and they just strive to do it better.
In fact, I think the original quote is credited to Pablo Picasso but Steve Jobs may have made it significantly more famous by saying, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”
If we’re going to be a creative people, we have to first throw away this ideology that creative people are logicians and vice-versa.
And then immediately after that, we have to throw away the idea that in order to be art, something has to be totally original. Creation is emulation of the world that we universally experience around us. We don’t create to be unique, we create to find middle ground and connect. If it were possible to create something so totally unique that nobody could relate to it, what purpose does it serve?
Thanks for reading today.
Much love. Peace!
