Last weekend I watched a documentary about Drew Struzan, an incredible artist who created some of the best film poster art ever committed to paper. I found it a really inspiring film and came away with a creative itch I just had to scratch!
I’d been wanting to change the painting we had hanging over the fireplace in our living room for a while. I had an old canvas in the loft, which I had intended to re-purpose and use again. I'd got as far as painting over the old piece of artwork on the canvas in jet black acrylic, but no further. So essentially, it was a canvas with a single, flat layer of black paint on it.
My wife loves elephants and I’ve been doing drawings of these beautiful creatures for a few decades now. As I looked at the black canvas, I could see in my mind’s eye, a single elephant, bathed in moonlight.
Drew Struzan used an airbrush in his work and often added paint spatters to create various effects and textures… and this was something I really wanted to try out.
I don’t own an air brush, but I did have an aerosol can of acrylic paint I’d bought for another art project.
My original idea was to paint a full-moon in the background, so I wanted to give the moon a 'glow' effect. So, I picked up the spray paint with the intention of creating a light, circular haze that I could later paint the moon in the middle of, plus maybe some clouds.
I laid the canvas flat on the floor and because I wanted quite a subtle effect, I didn’t press the nozzle button on the paint-can very hard at all. This meant more gas than paint came out the nozzle, and as I lightly moved the can over the canvas, small circular drips of paint fell on the black background. As if by magic, a starfield was emerging on the canvas, and it looked fantastic… so I kept going until the whole top half of the canvas became the night sky - speckled with a myriad of stars!
I wanted to differentiate the ground from the sky, so I mixed some white, black, yellow and brown acrylic paint and added lots of water, found a large decorating brush, loaded it up with watery paint and then flicked it all over the bottom section of the canvas. By experimenting with distance and various spatter techniques, soon I had a very messy and wet canvas.
Now usually, I’m quite impatient when I paint, but this time I overcame the urge to crack on and paint the elephant. Instead, I just stepped away and left the canvas to dry, curious about how it would look when it dried.
This weekend I returned to the canvas. The dried spatter effects looked great, so I put the canvas on an easel, mixed some paint for the elephant and just started painting. Within no time the elephant emerged on the canvas. There was a point where I felt I was over-working the detail and took a step back (which is a really important thing to do when you’re painting a big canvas). I’m glad I did - it allowed me to soften some of the detail I’d added, and improve the painting.
It hardly took any time at all. Soon I was able to take the old painting off the wall above the fireplace and replace it with the new one.
Over the course of the evening, I kept glancing up at it and as the light changed, so did the picture. Sometimes the sky and the ground seemed to coalesce, and the elephant almost looked like it was suspended in space. As it got darker the sky separated from the ground more clearly and the stars seemed to shine. Gradually, the elephant looked more and more three-dimensional, like it was coming forward, moving out of the darkness and stepping out of the painting.
Normally I look at a painting I’ve done and can only see the faults. Little things that annoy me. Things I think I could have done better. This painting just doesn’t feel like that at all. I look at it and I’m content.
As I reflect on all this now, I’m struck by how similar it is to coaching.
Sometimes, I have a coaching session where I see an opportunity to try out a new technique I’ve learned, the equivalent to trying out the spattering and spray can with my latest painting. This is exciting and creative. The main thing when doing this is to trust in yourself, be curious and be confident. You have a plan, but you hold it lightly – if it doesn’t work, you can always try something else. Sometimes it leads to something unexpected and beautiful – like the stars that speckled the canvas from the spray can.
Then there’s the part patience plays in both painting and coaching. In painting, it might be to leave something to dry, not knowing how it will look. In a coaching session, this might come through in silence, in leaving enough space for a thought to percolate, or emerge. It might be the need to leave enough time between coaching sessions, and appreciate that reflection, learning, even major break-throughs, take place in the ‘in-between’ – like the separation between the sky and the ground in my painting. Sometimes this is clear, sometimes it’s not, but with time and the right conditions,
clarity emerges. There’s something here about trusting the process too, whether that’s coaching or painting.
There are moments when I’m coaching when I get too hung up on detail, or technique, where I get too ‘inside my own head’ – this is the equivalent to the point in the painting where I was getting lost in the detail of painting the elephant. Fortunately, this time around, I decided to step back and look at the painting from a distance – this gave me enough perspective to understand how well the elephant worked in the setting. In coaching, this can be the point where you introduce a systemic lens, encouraging a coachee to consider ‘the bigger picture’, or simply when you ask a question that encourages the coachee to broaden their thinking, to take a step back and consider things from a different
perspective.
On a broader, metaphorical level, I also love the image of that majestic elephant emerging from the darkness. This speaks to me of those times when something beautiful and profound rises from a difficult, dark time. At times like these, our creativity and resourcefulness can shine a light on something deep within ourselves that is strong and authentic, just like that elephant… and when the light shifts, that strong, confident being comes into focus and moves forward.
Written by Paul Williamson, Executive Coach and author of 'Pheasant Dreams'
