PINC speakers: Don’t fear failure
SARASOTA – Santa Claus walks up to a clerk and asks, “What wine goes best with venison?”
One police German shepherd confesses to another: “I’m starting to really like the smell of cocaine.”
An elderly diner declines more food at a restaurant. “No thanks,” she says, “I’m trying to drop a casket size.”
Maybe you had to see the illustrations. But such was the sampling of one-panel cartoons that artist and featured speaker Matthew Diffee managed to sell to The New Yorker magazine over the years. Which begged the implicit question: Where do you get your ideas?
For the sixth straight year, the annual “most creative day in Sarasota” known as People, Ideas, Nature and Creativity,” or PINC, took an eight-hour plunge into the mystery and method of inspiration before a sellout crowd at the Sarasota Opera House. And as usual, approaches taken by the 12 scheduled speakers were all over the board.
There was violin-maker Daniel Houk, the prodigious star of acclaimed documentary “Strad Style,” alluding to reincarnation and magic as a wellspring of his mysterious skills. New York Academy of Art instructor Joe Mullins was guided by science and intuition while trying to restore young faces to the anonymous skulls lost in the statistics of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Spelunker Tyler Thrasher, who turns crab legs and snake skeletons into dazzling opalized works of art, said he liked to steal ideas from children.
But thematic threads were essentially simple and familiar: The world never changes by coloring inside the lines. And never be afraid to fail.
The first standing ovation went to sketch artist Stephen Wiltshire, mute as a child and diagnosed with autism at age three. At age 45, his photographic memory is celebrated worldwide for the detail he pours into panoramas of some of the civilization’s biggest cities.
On Wednesday, Wiltshire was ferried above Sarasota in a helicopter to get a look at the skyline. On Thursday morning, he took a seat to the side of the stage and recreated that scene from memory as other speakers addressed the crowd. Wiltshire was finished by early afternoon, his latest masterpiece a nuanced birds-eye view of the city looking east from the beach, Ringling Bridge in the foreground.
With Wiltshire smiling silently by her side, sister Annette did most of the explaining, told listeners how Steven “never complains,” communicates in a language that “everyone understands,” and choked up: “You are my love.”
A second “standing O” went out to women’s health entrepreneur Ridhi Tariyal, who effectively communicated her outrage over a medical system dominated by male perspectives. Her revolution is being forged by the invention of NextGen Jane’s Smart Tampon System, which can dispense with many invasive diagnostic procedures by analyzing DNA from menstrual cycle signatures instead.
Much of the 20-minute mini-lectures was devoted to sustainability, which is impossible without a massive change in the culture. Juha Kaakinen, CEO of a Finnish NGO that has helped reduce Finland’s homeless rate by more than 30 percent in recent years, argued that investing in the inhabitants of society’s margins can cut social services expenditures in half.
But a lot of stage time was devoted to trying to figure out how to reach back into childhood, where that sense of wonder comes naturally because the world is always new. Looking to the future, The Charles and Margery Barancik Foundation picked up the tab for 10 high school students, called PINC Scholars, to attend this year’s event (last year, PINC’s DreamLarge umbrella covered the bill).
One of the twists this year was that each student got to choose a favorite teacher to attend PINC as well. Among the beneficiaries was Riverview High International Baccalaureate literature teacher Es Swihart, who called the honor a “big, wonderful surprise.” Swihart also agreed with a number of speakers’ generic criticisms of how the education system inhibits creativity.
“It’s like we’re trying to tackle 21st century problems with 20th- or 19th-century models,” she said. “Our culture is so product-driven, and so much of what today is all about is focusing on the process. We need to be looking more closely at how to engage students in new ways.”
Diffee, the cartoonist, presented one of the most vivid examples of process. He offered a panel in which one of two pigeons perched on the ledge of a building says, “I’d say my biggest influence is Pollock.”
The concept took a week for him to pull it off. He showed off a single page cluttered with handwritten notes, phrases and ideas, his misfires and rejects, before settling on the line The New Yorker bought.
“Ideas are sometimes a problem without a solution,” Diffee warned his audience. But he encouraged them to take rejection in stride, and that “it’s better to come up with more ideas than one good idea.”
Following the last presentation, PINC founder Anand Pallegar informed his audience the city of Sarasota had proclaimed Thursday DreamLarge Day. Furthermore, he reminded visitors to pick up their LED light bulbs on the way out the door. They were donated by event partners Ringling College of Art + Design, Willis Smith Construction and Michael Saunders, who are participating in a national sustainability challenge called One Million Light Bulbs.
One last PINC event occurs at 7 p.m. Friday, when speaker and globetrotting Pine View School alumna Sophie Hollingsworth prepares a long-table, outdoor, VIP meal hosted by The Chiles Group. Every dish has been gathered from within a 27-mile radius of Sarasota.
To read the original Herald Tribune article, click here.