Why we need art, featuring Robert Mars.
Until the past couple of years, I have never really given too much thought to art. I guess I always appreciated it as I have been interested in photography and music since I was young. However, I didn’t realize how important art was to my life and the world in general until more recently.
You see, art drives creativity, and when you add creativity to your life, you come up with new ideas that didn’t exist before. You come up with beautiful pieces of work that draw awe and inspiration; but creativity also adds the ability to form world changing ideas.
Steve Jobs and the iPhone that is sitting 6 inches away from me is an important example. Did you know that Steve took a calligraphy class back when they were first building the Apple computer? The iPhone might not be what it is today without this class and the art class that he took to learn those skills.
He mentioned it in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech here with the following quote:
“If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.” — Steve Jobs
Then a few weeks ago I cam across a great quote:
“Colloration is not about gluing together existing egos. It’s about the ideas that never existed until everyone entered the room” — Unknown
So when you get a bunch of creative people in a room, it is possible to start to coming up with amazing ideas that people never thought could be possible.
At some point the Wright Brothers thought they could fly but had yet to do it; at some point John F Kennedy thought we could land on the moon but we had not yet been there; and at some point Steve Jobs thought he could build a computer that didn’t yet exist; but then they did it and it happened. And it’s all driven by the creative process in our brain, a creative process that can be developed by studying and creating art.
Today I got to check out an art studio and the work of Robert Mars. He is a fantastic artist and all around great guy. We got to talking about his art and how his creative process works, and where some of the ideas for his pieces were formed.
Turns out he works very close to the same way I do. He likes to combine different ideas and build on someone else’s platform. As humans we rarely come up with a totally unique idea by ourselves, but we can quite often build on someone else’s creativity. And we can merge ideas together that form something new; hence the name for my company Creative Collisions Tech.
Several of his art pieces have patterns on them. This idea actually came from his wife who had many quilt patterns around the house. He thought it would be cool to add it to his work and boom, something new is born. And then at some point you end up in art galleries in New York City; I guess I should say #goals.
It is when tech meets art is where things get really awesome in my opinion. That’s what I love and that’s the art I like to create. I like to use new technology such as drones and cameras to create videos that drive positive emotions in people. And I also love to think of ideas where I can merge art with technology to make creating art easier, it’s where the idea of Nomatyk Media Manager actually came from. I needed a piece of software that made it easier for me to create my own art (the videos and pictures), so I built it.
So this is why we need art. It’s not something that we should just let fall back into the past. It is something that should be celebrated and explored. So tomorrow, go create something new and figure out how you can incorporate art into your world.
