BONUS: Edvard Munch, exhibitions at Munch Museum Oslo Norway

 Hi, everyone. It's Mark with a special edition of unlocking your world of creativity. This week. I'm traveling to Oslo, Norway on the occasion of Oslo Innovation Week, a series of presentations. Conferences, breakout sessions on all sorts of creative ideas to improve the world, with a focus on that word innovation that we talk about on, in almost every episode of the podcast.

That innovation is making the ideas happen. It's bringing the creativity to life. And that's what these sessions will be about. And especially the one I'm focused on is the one on sustainability and what's called the circular economy. What happens to a product throughout its life and how can we improve the environmental impact, the health and being impact of products and brands that we call brands with a conscience.

So it should be quite an eventful week. But while I'm here, I'm also taking in some other creative inspiration, and I wanted to give you some highlights and insights from those creative stops I've made along the way. I'm really taking in Oslo's architecture, history, and art as I'm visiting here.

Today I visited the Edvard Munch Museum. And as Edward Monk is one of the most important artists, certainly from Norway and Scandinavia, but in his just overall work, it's quite an amazing body of work, especially in this style of modernism that he greatly Exemplified. One of the things that I found from this museum, and by the way, it's a gorgeous building, only two years old.

So there's a whole story behind the museum itself. Twelve stories of amazing design, artwork, exhibition spaces, and restaurants, and views of Oslo. Just amazing. But there are 28, 000 museum pieces of Edvard Munch in the museum. Some, of course, the paintings themselves, but also photographs implements the wood prints that he made.

The woodcuts. All sorts of items stored here, and then exhibited in a ongoing sort of way. One of the things that I observed today was what was called the Infinite. And then there was another exhibit, the Monumental. These were displays of work processes and ideas and really collections from they've been stored away for a while, so they bring them out and let us discover and rediscover some of them.

But this exhibit called Monumental was also quite striking. In the size and scope of some of these paintings much larger. In fact, the exhibit space was two stories tall to really give the space needed for these enormous works. These were large motifs that you might have seen in Munch's other works and, some of his sketches and things like that, but rarely have they been on display in such a public space as this.

Think about the size of that. Really built in a series of outdoor studios on his own property. He made several versions. One of the things that I smiled when I learned is that there were a number of pieces that the judges, the committee that were selecting the works of art for the university at that time, rejected.

And so he had to go back and rework them and some of them he said then if you're not going to take them, I'm going to, take it to someone else who will commission them. And that kind of resilience and stay at it kind of attitude, even for a famed artist like Edvard Munch, really struck me as something that we still can learn from all artists of all kinds.

It was also striking to me, of course, his most famous painting is The Screen. And it is in a very small room, lights dimmed, light protected, because we're very concerned about how these are being aged, so to speak, and, to protect the artwork. And, of course, it was the most crowded room in the whole museum.

But it struck me that if one piece of art led me to discover all of these others, a fraction of the 28, 000 works of art that are in the museum. Imagine what we could learn from that says we must have a signature work. We might, if we're a songwriter, you might have one hit. If you're an author, you might have one book.

If you're a restaurateur, you might be able to open one successful. restaurant. But imagine if that one piece gave your fans, your followers access to all the other things that we do. Wow. That's, that was amazing to me that, a museum that big and so many people wanted to see one piece of art, but then ended up becoming exposed to all this other work.

I'm thinking of the 28, 000. Just think of the prolific nature of Edvard Munch's work and then compare that to our own that says that someday, let's imagine, they want to build a museum to house all your work. We better get busy because we've got a lot of work to produce. And that also struck me as saying Wow, that is a quite a body of work and to really appreciate his style, his breadth of subjects.

It was really an amazing day to see that. So that were my highlights from the Edward Monk Museum. I am going to highlight some other creative opportunities that I'm taking advantage of here. So come along for the next edition of Unlocking Your World of Creativity from Oslo, Norway. I'm Mark Stinson, and we'll see you in the next episode.