A breakthrough story

I haven’t painted in ages. Has it been months or years? I cannot recall. But I did paint quite a bit at one point, and made what I consider some amazing murals and art works.

Last few years I have been immersed in many business growth projects. And I am looking at cracking acquisition channels and getting breakthroughs a lot.

Today in the middle of some work, I remembered a breakthrough I had on the canvas.

Earlier, I painted pictures from paint books. Mostly European paint books with their trees, their house styles and their people. One such scene was of a village – very colourful and happy – a few farms, pumpkin fields, houses and the village road passing through them. The highlight for me was an old water mill over a lake.

In front of the lake was an empty meadow – some brown grass stalks, flowering plants, empty ground…

I got totally stuck with this field. Multiple times I kept doing the field and wiping it off. It looked fake as hell. I mean everything else wasn’t really the most real but that field just looked like crap.

I was oil painting, which means I could literally wipe off the wet paint. And I kept doing this maybe 7, maybe 10 times…

Finally, I decided to not look at the book. Let’s see something in my mind and feel the paint onto the canvas.

It worked. The field became something original on that canvas and more like impressionism than the realistic picture in the book.

I looked at it often, it became a highlight for me.

And soon from that time I tried more such ‘feel-through’ paintings. I even painted a few with my bare fingers – helping get the emotions closer to the canvas. And from that came some lovely paintings.

One artist friend praised my work on the use of colours and flow on a specific mural. He said it is one of the best he has seen. and even some of the highly paid and professional painters can’t achieve this level of work. That was valuable because I knew he meant it.

I am still exploring my style of painting. And not every piece is great.

But it’s an exciting journey.

So, today I was just reflecting on how we have breakthroughs in everything we do. If we just do it often enough and I guess with some dedication.

Insight: shipping mediocre stuff is easy. But when we get stuck at something that is the golden opportunity to do much better.