Invent Every Day

 “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Pablo Picasso

"The Hill at Kuerner's" Chadd's Ford PA. © 2025 Wade B. Walton

Children are natural-born creators. At Thanksgiving dinner with my family last week, I watched my nieces and nephews running, playing, reading or sitting quietly with a coloring book, and inventing their own creative worlds. It’s a joy to watch kids experience the world for the first time, and to see how their imaginations inform what they learn.

I teach a business course on creative problem solving for adults, and one of the exercises involves showing the group a picture of an unconventional object and asking for their observations. Invariably, most of the group makes statements like “It won’t work,” “That can’t be used,” or “That’s a stupid design.” The participants’ reflex is to provide criticism, rather than to consider creative alternatives.

This isn’t their fault, and it’s not “wrong,” it’s lived experience, and conditioning. When asked for observations, it’s all too easy to provide criticism instead. As adults, many of us have been conditioned to believe that it’s our job to ensure the presenter of an idea is being realistic, or that we know from experience the idea “won’t work.”

We’ve been conditioned to provide judgmental criticism rather than exploring new possibilities.

Think what this mindset does to creativity at work. How can we bring a fresh approach to our work when the surroundings stay the same, day in and day out? When criticism seems rampant, and tasks start to feel rote?

How could we use the familiarity of our surroundings and roles to revive our innate creative selves, like we did when we were kids?

What if we could sustain creativity not for a year, or five, or ten years, but for our whole careers?

As I pondered this, I thought of Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), a highly successful artist from Chester County PA, where I live and work. Celebrated, famous, often misunderstood by critics, his prolific body of work is impressive and resonates today. Some of his most famous works (think “Christina’s World”) have underlying stories that provide additional context to what the eye sees, heightening their overall impact.

Andrew Wyeth grew up in a family of artists where creativity was nourished and celebrated. From chests full of costumes family members could use for dressing up, to personal art instruction from N.C. Wyeth, by then a famous illustrator and artist and Andrew’s father, creativity was an integral part of the environment at their home in Chadds Ford, PA.

As Wyeth’s fame grew, so did the value of his work; in fact, he was so successful that he could have painted anywhere in the world. However, his favorite subjects were close to home: in Chadds Ford, and in Cushing, Maine, where his family summered.

Additionally, Wyeth developed a specific palette, limiting color so that he could focus on story. “Trodden Weed”, from 1951, appears at first to be simply a close-up shot of a man’s boots, and he’s walking on a sere landscape. But this is actually a self-portrait of Andrew Wyeth, and he was recovering from an illness at the time. These were another famous painter Howard Pyle’s boots, and Andrew wore them while walking the winter fields near his home to get his strength back. The location is the hill in my photograph above, a place that carried deep meaning for him and that appears often in his work.. Knowing all of this, the painting takes on deeper meaning, revealing more about the artist and his connection to his surroundings.

“Spring” is a portrait of Wyeth’s friend, Karl Kuerner, who lived nearby. The surreal presentation of Kuerner lying in a leftover snowbank on a hill is deeply unsettling at first; in fact, I can feel the sensation of lying there and it chills me to the bone. What is going on here?

Wyeth explained that he painted the work to memorialize Kuerner, who was very sick at the time and was bedridden. Visiting Kuerner, he noticed how the white bedsheet lay around him like a snowdrift. Wyeth decided to paint the hillside outside Kuerner’s home and placed him in a snowdrift on the same hill.

These are just two of many examples of the creativity underlying Wyeth’s work, and they were created within view of his childhood home. Rather than finding his immediate surroundings dull, Wyeth was able to constantly find fresh detail and new ideas within his surroundings. Like children do.

That Wyeth chose to limit himself to these two areas is an important tie to the work many of us do. Wyeth’s creative output is undeniable, and he did it over a lifetime, painting until just before he passed away at 91. 70 years of sustaining a creative career, largely in two locations, proves it’s possible to come up with fresh approaches over an entire lifetime.

Often, most of our lives are lived within a particular setting, particularly in work. Though some of us travel the world as part of our work, for many of us, we go to the same place every day, park in the same spot, sit at the same desk, talk with the same people. And those meetings! (But that’s a topic for another time.)

For now, let’s brainstorm how we can bring fresh eyes to our surroundings over the long term, and generate creativity where we are:

·       How do you bring fresh eyes to our familiar spaces at work, and in life?

·       What can we notice in our surroundings that can inspire us each day?

·       What are some areas in your life or career where you may have been conditioned to criticize, rather than support?

Tell me what you think in the comments!