Submitting to the Magic Grid: creative decision making through painting

I just returned from a trip to Guatemala with my mom, and I wanted to share some of my reflections from the trip. My mom invited me to come along – a joint trip hosted by Local Hope, a Guatemala non-profit focused on self-reliance through education and medical support, and Art Ambassadors for a Colorful World, a global nonprofit focused on providing arts education to children. 

We traveled first to Guatemala City, the capital city, with day trips to Mixco Viejo ruins & Sumpango for Dia de los Muertos, then to San Martin, a rural village in the Guatemalan Highlands, then Lake Atitlan, a stunning volcanic lake, then Tikal, Mayan ruins in the jungle, then Flores, a Caribbean-island-feeling small town, then back to Guatemala City. It was a HUGE adventure, and I’m so happy I got to experience it with my mom!

Some of my highlights included helping teach art classes with my mom to the children at Local Hope’s facilities, a sunrise hike in Tkal to hear the jungle (and howler monkeys!) wake up, visiting a ceramic studio on the cliffs of Lake Atitlan, practicing my Spanish & getting to learn the incredible stories of so many people in Guatemala and reinvigorating my love for painting. 

I’ll write more about my time in Guatemala, but I wanted to reflect first on what I learned through painting. 

Submitting to the grid

Kevin Macpherson, one of the leaders of Art Ambassadors of a Colorful World, is one of the most well known plein air painters, who’s traveled to over 60+ countries to paint, written multiple books, and served as a keynote speaker at conventions. He formalized a painting approach he calls the “Magic Grid.” If you’re curious, here’s a great video he made about it:

The Magic Grid introduces surprising variety into your paintings. It can be incredibly difficult for existing painters to “learn,” because it requires you to basically start your painting approach from scratch. You must submit and trust the grid fully to carry you through your painting, which can be really challenging.

You start by drawing a diagonal line, then horizontal line ⅓ of the way through the line, and then a vertical line where those two lines intersect, and then rinse and repeat on any rectangle shape you see on the canvas until you have a grid of big, medium, and small shapes like this: 

After drawing the grid, use the grid to guide your composition as you draw your subject lines.  

After you have both your grid lines and subject lines – you start with your darkest dark in the on grid space to serve as the floor of your value range. Competing darkest darks will confuse a viewer, so starting with and sticking to just one helps guide your painting.

After that, you work through each form, selecting the color that you see (or maybe what you want to see – the light changes so fast! ). To avoid getting frustrated, Kevin recommended framing the painting like “I’m just taking color notes of this scene to show my friends the beauty I saw.” Easier said than done – but I found moving to a different part of the painting helped to relieve some of the frustration I felt when I was getting stuck. 

As you fill the shapes, Kevin jokes the texture should look like the paint created a “fart” sound when you put it on the canvas. Not just thick – super super thick. If you took a palette knife and scraped all the paint off, it should be chunky. 

The grid is a decision making guide – what might have been one color shape turns into six or eight interesting shapes. You are forced to consider value and color in each square – so each painting becomes engaging to the viewer. It’s mentally exhausting in a wonderful way – each painting contains hundreds of decisions.  Each painting is an opportunity to work on different aspects of painting – different subject matter, lines, value ranges, styles, colors. 

One of the recommendations Kevin made was to number each painting as you progress. The more intuitive the grid becomes, the less strictly you have to follow it. The contrast between my first grid painting and my last grid painting – only a week! – felt dramatic. 

Creating a grid for investing

I’ve watched my mom paint and talk about painting for the past twenty years – but I hadn’t personally picked up a paint brush in years. In that time, my life has changed quite dramatically from a high school student to running my own investment firm. The core aspect of my role as an investor now is to make those decisions, and the Magic Grid made me start thinking about the language of our investing frameworks as a firm. 

I think the wonderful nature of the Magic Grid allows 

1. painters of all different mediums and styles to create visually engaging paintings that truly sing, and 
2. Individual painters to get faster at making those decisions of color and texture and value at an increasing rate. 

As I was coming back, I thought a lot about how to continue to develop the language or “grid” of my investing practice to do two things: 

1. Allow other investors within our firm in the future to make great investment decisions 
2. Individually improve my own decision making process 

I don’t have answers to what the grid might look like yet, but I am seeking to continuously simplify and make more explicit the nature, style, and strategy of my investing philosophy over the span of my venture career(and get better at painting!). 

I feel so grateful to have the opportunity to explore creative decision making through painting, travel Guatemala, and volunteer to help with art classes, and am excited to continue learning & practicing the craft (especially with my mom!)

Hope you all are doing well!