Standing in front of a bare black canvas, Erik Wahl made bold strokes with thick paintbrushes, first in yellow and a peachy orange, then in black, and finally, with quick twists of his wrist, in red, gold, and green. In less time than a video took to play John Lennon’s “Imagine,” a portrait of the late Beatle emerged.
A deft dash of creativity like that, Wahl told attendees at the Luxury show’s keynote breakfast on May 28, can spark new connections with customers and keep a business growing amid increased competition from artificial intelligence.
“Sometimes it does pay to take a risk,” said Wahl, a painter, motivational speaker, and author of the best seller Unthink: Rediscover Your Creative Genius.
Wahl started his career on a conventional business path, but after losing his job during the dot-com bubble, he seized on his talent for speed-painting—the ability to create a fully realized celebrity portrait in just three or four minutes—as a device to inspire business leaders to take creative chances.
During his 45-minute appearance at Luxury, Wahl produced three large paintings: the portrait of Lennon; a picture of the Statue of Liberty styled in red, blue, and yellow; and his version of a well-known image of Albert Einstein, which Wahl painted upside down and then turned around to applause.
He also displayed his takeoff of Vermeer’s “Girl With a Pearl Earring” in which the familiar pearl is replaced with a sparkling diamond drop. He announced he would give that painting to the Jewelers for Children charity to auction.
Wahl asked his Luxury audience of several hundred designers and retailers if they can draw. Fewer than half raised their hands.
“If I went down to your preschool, any preschool anywhere in the entire country, and ask, ‘Hey, kids, who here can draw?’, the response you get is 100%,” Wahl said. “School taught us to think about one standard response, to become risk-averse.”
And that impulse to think inside the box, he argued, leaves businesses vulnerable to AI’s automated thinking. Instead, he said, business leaders should be “intentionally slowing down, looking for a way to go back in and build an emotional connection of future customer loyalty.”
He reminded the crowd that selling jewelry is in large part about selling emotions. “Make the truth fascinating,” he said. “It’s not about being either a dreamer or a doer, but…to allow ourselves that luxury of becoming dream doers.”
Prior to Wahl’s talk, the audience heard from Bogolo Joy Kenewendo, Botswana’s minister of minerals and energy. (House of Botswana, a government initiative for the diamond industry, and the Natural Diamond Council sponsored the event.)
“We are living through a moment when consumers are surrounded by artificial experiences,” said Kenewendo. “People are searching again for things that feel real. They want to have things with duration, things with meaning, things that endure. And that is the power of Botswana natural diamonds.”
(Photographs by Camilla Sjodin)
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