Painting for the Gold

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Rugby 1928 Gold Medal Winning Painting Jean Jacoby
Collection: Olympic Museum Lausanne

Competition and art have never seemed to be very compatible to us. To create a painting, music or a poem, can require the same one-pointed focus and intense concentration of the athletes we are watching in the Olympics, but it also requires a disconnect from the ego’s constant default of comparing oneself to others or of needing to prove oneself to be better or the best. Competition can be a way to push further, but there is a quiet contemplation that can’t seem to be put into a time or result-defined space that may be most important for touching the creative pulse.

Over the decades, the Olympics have struggled with some of these same questions. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the IOC (International Olympic Committee) and the modern Olympic Games in 1894, called for the recognition of the highest ideals of mind and body, including the ar…