WHY CONNECTIONS MATTER

One of the things I have come to understand after spending most of my life moving between painting, design, drawing, teaching, and all the other things that tend to occupy the space between them is that I don't really believe in the boundaries between those disciplines anymore.

When I was younger, I was much more comfortable keeping things in their proper places. Painting was painting. Design was design. Teaching was teaching. There were rules, categories, specialties, and probably a few people standing around making sure nobody crossed the lines. As my work developed, those boundaries became harder to maintain. Something I learned while painting would change the way I approached a design problem. A design project would make me see composition differently in the studio. A student would ask a question that forced me to reconsider something I thought I understood perfectly well. The categories were still there, but the interesting stuff was happening between them.

That has become one of the things I pay the most attention to.

I see connections everywhere now, although I suspect that has less to do with getting wiser and more to do with having accumulated enough years and enough questionable decisions to have a fairly large collection of things to connect.

Artists and designers are particularly good at collecting this kind of material. We gather images, conversations, colors, objects, experiences, mistakes, observations, frustrations, things we admire, things we hate, and things we can't quite explain. Most of it sits quietly in the background. Then something happens that makes one of those old experiences relevant to something happening right now.

That is where things can get interesting.

I remember working on design problems where the solution had very little to do with the project itself. The answer might come from something I had seen in a painting, the structure of a building, the way a particular photograph was composed, or something completely unrelated that had lodged itself somewhere in my memory. At the time, those things didn't seem particularly important. They were simply things I had noticed. Years later, they could suddenly become useful.

This is one of the reasons I have always encouraged students to look outside of their immediate area of interest. If you're studying graphic design, don't spend all your time looking at graphic design. If you're a painter, for God's sake, go look at something other than paintings once in a while. Look at architecture. Look at old photographs. Go to a museum and spend twenty minutes looking at something you don't understand. Listen to music you wouldn't normally choose. Pay attention to how a movie is edited. Look at the way a restaurant has arranged its tables. Notice how someone has solved a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with the problem you're trying to solve.

You may not know what any of it has to do with your work.

That's precisely the point.

Our education tends to push us toward specialization. There are good reasons for that. We need people who know an enormous amount about particular things. But specialization can also create blinders. When we become too focused on what belongs inside our field, we can miss what is happening just outside it.

And there is an enormous amount happening just outside it.

Some of the most useful things I have learned about design didn't come from design. Some of the things I understand about painting came from years of working in graphic design. Teaching has probably changed both more than either of them would like to admit.

Teaching, in particular, has made me aware of how often another person's question can expose a connection I hadn't noticed myself. Students have a remarkable ability to ask the question you have spent twenty years avoiding. Sometimes they don't even realize they've done it.

That's one of the reasons I enjoy teaching so much.

It keeps me honest.

It also keeps me curious.

A classroom is full of people bringing different experiences, interests, assumptions, and visual languages into the same room. When those things collide, something useful can happen. A student who thinks completely differently from you can reveal an approach you would never have considered. A conversation can change the direction of a project. Someone else's interpretation of an image can make you see the image differently yourself.

That is a connection too.

And this is where I think the idea becomes larger than art and design.

We tend to think of connections as things we deliberately make. We connect one idea to another. We connect one piece of information to something we already know. We connect a problem to a possible solution. But a lot of the most meaningful connections in our lives happen without any particular plan.

A song comes on and suddenly you're fifteen years younger.

You walk into a building and remember someone you haven't thought about in years.

You see a particular color and suddenly remember a place.

Someone tells you a story and it changes the way you think about something that happened to you.

None of this is particularly mysterious. Our experiences are tangled together whether we organize them that way or not.

The creative opportunity is in becoming more aware of those relationships.

I've had paintings develop from things that had nothing to do with painting. I've had design ideas influenced by paintings I made years earlier. I've had conversations with students that stayed with me long after the class ended and eventually found their way into my own thinking. I've taken photographs because something caught my attention without knowing why, only to understand years later what it was that interested me in the first place.

The connection often becomes visible in retrospect.

That's important because it means we don't always have to understand everything immediately.

I think this is where people sometimes get themselves into trouble creatively. They want every experience to have a purpose. They want to know what something is for, where it is going, and whether it will eventually become something useful. We do this because usefulness is comforting. It gives us the satisfying feeling that we are being productive.

But curiosity doesn't always work on a production schedule.

Sometimes you see something interesting and that's enough.

Keep it.

Take the photograph.

Make the sketch.

Write down the sentence.

Remember the color.

Go look at the strange thing again.

You don't have to turn it into anything.

I've kept things for years that seemed completely irrelevant when I first encountered them. Some eventually found their way into my work. Most didn't. I don't consider that wasted effort. They became part of the way I see.

And I think that may be the real value of making connections.

They change the way we see.

Once you've spent enough time looking at architecture, you begin to see structure differently in a painting. Once you've spent enough time studying typography, you start noticing rhythm in places that have nothing to do with type. Once you've spent years drawing, you become sensitive to gesture in a way that is difficult to explain to someone who hasn't spent that time looking.

Experience accumulates.

Then it starts talking to itself.

This is also why I don't think creative people should be afraid of being influenced. Influence gets treated as though it is something we should defend ourselves against, as if every artist or designer is supposed to develop in a sealed laboratory where nothing from the outside world can contaminate the work.

That's bullshit.

Of course we're influenced.

We should be.

The interesting question is what we do with those influences.

We absorb them, argue with them, misunderstand them, steal a little, transform a little, combine them with something else, and eventually they become part of our own visual and intellectual vocabulary. That process is happening whether we acknowledge it or not.

The goal isn't to avoid influence. The goal is to develop enough awareness to understand what you're doing with it.

That is where personal voice begins to emerge.

Not from trying desperately to be original, but from having a particular collection of experiences, interests, observations, influences, mistakes, obsessions, and contradictions that nobody else has in quite the same combination.

Your connections are yours.

Mine are mine.

That's why two people can look at the same thing and walk away with completely different ideas. We're never really looking at anything with empty eyes. We're bringing everything we've experienced with us.

And that is why I think it is worth paying attention to what you pay attention to.

Notice what keeps catching your eye. Notice the things you return to. Notice the subjects you can't seem to leave alone. Notice the things that make you curious even when you don't know why. Notice what you borrow from one part of your life and carry into another.

There is information in all of that.

I've spent a long time moving between disciplines, and I don't think I did it because I had some grand plan to build an interdisciplinary creative practice. I was simply interested in too many things to stay in one lane.

That has probably been one of the more useful accidents of my career.

Painting taught me something.

Design taught me something else.

Teaching complicated both of them.

Life has been throwing things into the mix ever since.

At some point I stopped trying to keep everything separated and started paying attention to what happened when I put things together.

That's where I find the good stuff.

Not always. Certainly not immediately. Sometimes you put two things together and discover that they should never, ever meet again.

But every now and then, something clicks.

A relationship appears that wasn't obvious before. A familiar thing looks different because it has been placed beside something unfamiliar. A problem opens up into a possibility. A mistake becomes useful. A question becomes more interesting than the answer you were originally looking for.

Those moments are worth following.

So when I tell my students to make connections, I'm not asking them to manufacture clever relationships between unrelated things. I'm asking them to stay curious long enough to notice the relationships that are already forming.

Look outside your discipline.

Pay attention to what interests you.

Follow the things that don't quite make sense.

Let yourself be influenced.

Keep the strange photograph.

Save the terrible sketch.

Listen to the person who sees something you don't.

And occasionally put two things together simply because you're curious about what might happen.

You may discover nothing.

You may discover something you didn't know you were looking for.

Either way, you've been paying attention.

And that, I've learned, is usually where the interesting stuff begins.