The tension between structure and magic makes successful creative
You may not know this about me, but I trained as an artist and am a painter (although I don’t get to practice much these days). One of my sketches is the header image of this article (no AI here!).
Along the way, I have been taught by some truly great painters, including Alistair Nisbet-Smith. He taught me some truly great lessons on the nature of creativity, and I wanted to share them with you. I got to meet with him recently, and it was fantastic. One overarching concept from when he taught me stuck with me and serves me well today.
Here are the words that every business blog reader dreads: I will get a little personal here. This will not be one of those articles ending with “….and this is what painting taught me about B2B marketing”). As you’ll see, it applies to our professional lives, but I appreciate it’s a stretch, so bear with me.
The concept is this: successful art, creative work, or whatever it is, is made by the tension between structure and chaos (or maybe you could describe the latter as creativity or “magic”). Too much structure and the work is bland; too much magic, and it’s a mess, too much for the human mind to cope intellectually or aesthetically. To resolve a creative work, you must balance the two successfully.
Lessons in a small, smelly room
Spider-Man vs The Scorpion, Amazing Spider-Man #20 1/1/1965 (c) Marvel, used under fair use.
I’ve been obsessed with drawing and painting my whole life. It started with my first comic book (the classic first Spider-Man vs the Scorpion issue drawn by Steve Ditko). In my last year of school, I got to experience Form 7 painting with Alistair. (Form 7 sounds like we were learning some cool Japanese art kata, but the boring truth is that the New Zealand school system used to have a truly bizarre system for naming the year or grade you were in… so Form 7 meant the last year of school in the 1990s).
In the small room where a handful of us were taught, which smelled of turps and oil paint, Alistair had a central table piled with books, covered in charcoal and painted fingermarks, on the great painters, mainly those of the 1950s—1980s and primarily those devoted to gestural painting. That meant people like Francis Bacon, Lee Krasner, Willem De Kooning, and Julian Schnabel.
Lessons in creativity
Head, 1974 by Alistair Nisbet-Smith. Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Used under fair use.
Alistair was the archetype of a passionate, inspirational teacher. One of the abiding lessons he taught me, mainly through showing us, was that great painting, especially in the abstract world, is about the tension between magic and structure. Successfully resolving a painting required that.
Some subtle guidelines underpinned the philosophy that Alistair taught. Alistair celebrated the mark or the gesture that was made spontaneously. He believed that your proclivities would mean that you made similar marks, and the whole game was trying to trick yourself into making creative mistakes that surprised you. That meant that individual creative gestures and techniques were meaningful.
At the same time, the work as a whole > any individual gesture or piece of art. That meant you might have a section of the painting you love because the paintwork was so good or for some other reason…. But sometimes, the rest of the painting moves on, and you need to “kill your darlings” to resolve the entire painting. That section gotta go.
de Kooning: fighting against personal style
Willem de Kooning, Door to the River, 1960 (c) Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, used under fair use.
Another person who talked about this a lot was Willem de Kooning. de Kooning expressed a disdain for rigid stylistic constraints because, among other things, your own nature would force it on you anyway.
He said: “Style is a fraud. I always felt that the Greeks were hiding behind their columns.” He criticised artists like Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian for imposing strict styles, calling it “a horrible idea.”
De Kooning believed that adhering to a fixed style was limiting and preferred a more organic approach to art. Like Alistair, he emphasised the importance of spontaneity and the emergence of unplanned elements in his work, suggesting that a more authentic image arises from embracing chance rather than deliberate intention.
Despite his efforts to avoid a consistent style, de Kooning acknowledged that his work would inevitably reflect his unique artistic identity. This was what Alastair was trying to teach us: the tension between an artist’s desire to break free from stylistic constraints and the natural tendencies that define their work.
An amusing aside about me and Willem de Kooning (and Judy Chicago)
A few years later, as a student at the Elam School of Fine Arts, I attended a lecture by Judy Chicago, an American artist, educator, and writer known for her pioneering contributions to feminist art. Chicago gained prominence in the 1970s with The Dinner Party (1974–1979), an installation celebrating women’s history through symbolic place settings.
It’s important for this story to remember that being educated in the 1990s was the very early days of the internet. It wasn’t widely available or as helpful as it is today. This was especially true for art because, in New Zealand, we do not physically get any art from overseas. My entire experience of artists from overseas was gleaned from books like the ones in the old art room at school. None of us read or studied the biographies of the artists particularly closely, and what we did read was naturally entirely positive (because the book was about that artist). This may seem incredible now when you can find real-time criticism for anyone or anything!
That’s why I was surprised and fascinated when Chicago spent a chunk of the lecture taking de Kooning to the metaphorical cleaners for his “Women” series. It turns out that for a lot of feminist thinkers, this series was misogynistic and not particularly useful for the cause. It was the first time I’d heard meaningful criticism of anyone, let alone anyone I’d poured over for years.
Afterwards, my head of school introduced me to Judy Chicago. The conversation focused on how I’d been involved in a challenging project that I successfully navigated because an art history lecture on a famous painter had inspired me.
“Who was it again, Dave?” she said. It was de Kooning. I wish I could say that we said that out loud to Chicago, but I can’t remember. But I have a terrible poker face, so I did go bright red.
What’s the lesson for business or marketing here?
As I said at the top, this is not one of those articles where I want to get too analogical about these lessons and the usual topics we discuss here. But there is no hiding it: those principles I learnt from Alistair and Elam have held me in good stead for my professional career, creative marketing, writing, and especially running my own business.
This idea of balancing structure and magic doesn’t just apply to painting. The same tension plays out in business, marketing, and leadership. You know the challenge if you’ve ever launched a product, led a team, or built a campaign. Too much process and creativity gets smothered; too much freedom and execution falls apart. Whether crafting a marketing strategy or scaling a company, the best work happens when you create enough structure to support creativity—without crushing it.
Some practical applications
Right off the top, and in no particular order, here are how those lessons manifest themselves for me:
- Structure: I recognise that creativity comes relatively easily to me, but structure does not. I surround myself with good people who know how to build processes, and I consciously work harder on the structural side of things. As a good friend says, you want to be a clockmaker, not a time-teller.
- Structure and magic: when reviewing writing or design creative, sometimes you feel something is wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. Generally, I go to look at the structure and magic setup. Is it too sensible and dull? Or is it too wildly creative and breaking up to the eye or mind?
- Killing your darlings: Every day, I fall in love with a piece of my writing, but only later on in the edit do I realise it’s got to go. That is when your ego needs to take a back seat and hit that delete button. We’ve all been involved in those business initiatives where the market shifts, and you must abandon the project. But you must set aside all your work for the business’s good.
- Capitalising on good mistakes: I once engaged with ChatGPT on voice chat and messed up my instructions. Mid-conversation, I found myself saying, “Let’s start again.” ChatGPT thought I meant “write an article about starting again.” The result was a bizarre article, but it was such a cool idea that I wrote about it.
Can you make these concepts work for AI?
Something in these lessons relates to this transformative technology we call AI. AI excels at structure: optimising, analysing, and predicting with precision.
Can AI create magic? Sometimes, definitely. It can make some stunning “good mistakes” (sometimes through hallucinations or high “temperature”). It can help with iterative creativity on an unprecedented scale and speed. AI’s role in assisting with precision and structural workflows unlocks more creativity and innovation in its human partners. Discernment is still in the human domain. This is the new version of the “tension between structure and magic” we must navigate.
Embrace the tension
At their core, the best creative and business decisions are based on the tension between structure and magic, discipline and spontaneity, logic and intuition. Whether we’re painting, marketing, or leading a company, the goal isn’t to eliminate this tension but to work within it.