Every Leader Is an Artist: How the World’s Greatest Artists Can Make You a More Creative Leader

Chapter 1

Intent: Leadership Begins in the Mind

Question: What am I trying to accomplish?

Impression—Sunrise, Claude Monet(Photograph: Getty Images)

Claude Monet was familiar with the new research on perception and light in the second half of the nineteenth century, including the work of French chemist Michel Chevreul (Chevreul originally worked with carpet dyes and later wrote a treatise on the way we see colors and, in particular, on the optical effects of neighboring colors). Monet’s fascination with visual perception prompted a lifelong ambition to “paint the air”: to study and represent how light breaks up on and between objects and how it ...