Four Steps That Help You Connect The Dots

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Since I just came back from Andalucía, Spain, I thought it’d be cool to write about Sevilla’s most famous artist, the one and only Diego Velázquez and his masterpiece Las Meninas (which is actually not in Sevilla but in Madrid, hanging at El Prado).

Las Meninas has fascinated, puzzled, enamored, and obsessed people for more than 350 years. Yes, there’s great execution and mastery in Velázquez’s brushstrokes, light, shadows, and choice of colors, but its real allure lies in connecting the dots.

Viewers are magnetized not just by the scene but by everything that lies beneath. There are hints that were invisible to the viewer at the time but later revealed through his work.

The subconscious is always picking up clues and messages that the conscious mind doesn’t necessarily process at first glance.

Here are four steps that help you connect dots in a creative way:

To connect the dots in meaningful ways, it’s always necessary to pay careful attention to your surroundings. In Velázquez case, he was the court painter and a close friend of King Philip IV of Spain.

He also was the private curator of the monarch’s ever-growing art collection. The bottom line is that Velázquez was so intimate with the royals and had spent so much time hanging out with them that he observed and registered things not many were privy to, which he had to record.

In 1656, the king commissioned Velázquez a painting to memorialize his new family. The Infanta Margaret Theresa, the king’s daughter, is the little five-year-old blonde girl, who’s illuminated more than any other character in the painting. She is surrounded in the shadows by an entourage whose members include two young maids curtsying around the little princess. There are also two dwarves, a mastiff, a chaperone, and a female bodyguard. In the rear is the queen’s chamberlain.

On the mirror on the back wall is the eerie reflection of the king and queen.

Finally, Velázquez himself stands in front of his giant canvas looking straight at us, the viewers, or depending on the interpretation, at the king and queen, who may have been posing for him. This issue on perspective and who’s looking at who is one of the debates that has occupied historians, writers, critics, and philosophers for two hundred years.

Everything you do, whether it’s the art you make, the posts you share on social media, the marketing campaigns your business runs – it all has an intention. And it’s better to always be clear as to what that intention is because it can attract or repel people. Or it could fascinate crowds for centuries.

While Velázquez didn’t tell anyone why he decided to paint the king and his wife in an opaque, shadowy, mirror reflection, historians have bet that the painting contained a prediction on how the monarchy may cease to exist.

The raison d’être for the inclusion of the royal couple continues to be a question centuries later for Spaniards and anyone who is interested in challenging arbitrary structures of power.

If Velázquez was indeed painting the king and queen as sitters reflected in the mirror, the size of the canvas in front of him makes no sense. Its enormous dimensions correspond proportionately to that of Las Meninas, which is ten feet tall.

However, no single or double portrait at the time was ever made at such scale. Is Velázquez implying that the viewers, no matter how humble, can have the same perspective as the nobility? Does he want to equate the commoners and the royals?

The expression on Margaret’s face is one of loneliness and responsibility. Although she is only five years old, Velázquez knew the rough life she had ahead of her—a life regimented by rules and controlled by others.

History tells us that dwarves were kept as part of the court because of their astuteness and great intelligence. They were there as reminders to their masters of their own fleeting lives and that no crown or riches could change their fates at the time of their death. Their presence and that of the dog gives the impression that life for the royal family is a bit of a circus, a shallow façade.

Then there’s Velázquez’s self-portrait. He inserted himself in the scene for posterity. He didn’t consider himself an artisan, as people in Spain tended to call painters. No, he was the king’s friend, curator, and official painter.

He wanted to elevate painting from a craft, as it was then considered, to a recognized art form and to immortalize himself with dignity. Velázquez was so confident about his role that the artworks hanging behind him show reproductions of two Rubens paintings of mythological scenes—Pallas and Arachne and Pan and Apollo. Both myths tell of jealous gods who couldn’t stand the talents of mortals.

Velázquez’s subtle message is that he wields the power of his brush with more strength, talent, and conviction than the king wields his own. Indeed, Velázquez continues to be more famous and more relevant than any previous Spanish monarch and will continue to be, long after the current ones have been forgotten.

Sir Richard Branson has a motto that he always reminds his employees across the Virgin companies: A+B+C+D (Always Be Connecting the Dots).

The truth is that we collect dots all the time: we read new books, we take notes, we gather data from our websites, we watch TED talks. But then we don’t spend a good amount of time making sense of them.

So first you have to see the context, your surroundings, the bigger picture, and then add what is relevant to your business or practice, like connecting several customer needs and wants in order to solve their much bigger problems. Or connecting services and products for a more robust experience.

The point is to connect these dots with authenticity and originality. Including the underlying messages that we don’t disclose and that artists, like Velázquez, are so good at.

The trick is to keep your eyes open and to remain confident in your mixing-and-matching capabilities.

And for the next few weeks, spend more time connecting, not gathering, dots.

HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD

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