Company values - concept of the painting

I was asked to  create a concept of the artistic expression of the company´s values. Just a concept,  not the realisation, just idea, not the form – the best task for me!

The values are as follows:

HONESTY

PERSONAL  EXAMPLE

HUMILITY

FOCUS ON PEOPLE

RESPECT

RESULTS

INNOVATION

      So abstract, so general, so spiritual ... how to bring them to the reality, how to dress them into graphic form? That was a question to which it was not easy to find an answer, I thought – it is not possible at the beginning... But it is! And there is so many ways to do it...

     

Even though I am not the author of this painting (the painter is Acad.arch. Ján Jura), I had the right to choose him and I am proud of my choice! He was the best one to do it and I had the unique opportunity to find out that he really is like what I thought. I am still missing those moments to have a possibility to watch the whole process from the idea through the final hanging it on the wall. even to collecting opinions and first impressions of viewers...

Being somewhere behind the scene, I could be here from the beginning but I was a kind of the author´s companion during the painting creation process too and now since I work for the company, I walk around it on the corridor every day, thinking about all the things it reminds - I am even the user!

And now - I can not tell which one of the ideas which I can see in that picture - which I like the most... There is as many things hidden in this painting as many people will look at it.. If my idea was used (I believe it was, I can see it there) - we can see a TREE there, huge big tree, with beautiful bushy crown and deep huge underbrush of roots reaching to the fertile soil providing nutrients for it to grow. It´s matrix is formed by our values, which nobody can see, but nobody can doubt they do exist somewhere in the depth seing the beauty of its crown. The author added his own view to the topic, as for him, there is a ROAD, the road through the life and the values like the milestones appear on our way - yes, it is there! As far as I know he put there also the WINGS, - symbolic white cover formed by the values, like mother protecting her little kids, I can really feel this safety looking at it:

An expressive sign in the top middle part is a simplyfied symbol of DNA - the most gold-mouthed element of this piece, of our work, of our life... as our values come from our features, from our charecters which we are given and can be read in our DNA. Maybe nothing else should be there, - just DNA, it is powerfull enough, isn´t it? How this idea had been born? Very funny... Looking at all suggestions  we with architect Jura discussed the possibilieties, apparently no one satisfied him. Suddenly he came up with an idea - let´s make it abstract, let´s make it "formless blob"! Oh! Isn´t that too much?!?! (I couldn´t imagine the moment I will present this to my boss!) OK, it can be, but if only there would be some movement in this mass, a swirl? I will never forget this moment, when we both suddenly saw it, I can´t tell who was the first, But we felt it´s the one which we looked for!
We played with an idea to make there a STAIRCASE in a shape of DNA - how double symbolic that would be!

Something like the stairs-design of Philipe Stark. But later on we found out it would be too complicated. 
Furthermore -  the arc at the top is a down part of my tree crown but it is a BOAT as well -  symbolic Archa which can save us. Or another meaning - it is just the down part of a tree-crown! I like this way how he transformed the whole tree into its middle part segment so much...When I asked what are those little triangles up there in a boat? "The little trees" - he answered. Nice...There is even more meanings which he put there, I know. He doesn´t talk about them. Me too. So I even can not write about them as I am not sure, But I think one of them I found. Here are his drawings which are the documents of his way towards the final result:

                                 

What the observers saw in the picture? How did they react? It brought a storm of opinions, everybody wanted to add an opinion, but it had calmed down now already, some of them found there a glass bottle of a medicine with little pills in it (very practical and logic as this a pharmaceutical company), may be there are flowers in a vase? Or a lake in the midnight moonlit, or a landing spaceship rolling out a ladder... yes, somebody saw even the steps there ...

Here are some drawings how did I think about the topic before we somehow reached the above result:

My first intention was to avoid the use of the letters in the painting and to express all those abstract values in gestures, poses of human figures. May be like this:

HONESTY (figure with his heart in his hands)

PERSONAL  EXAMPLE (a person leading the others with a flag in his hands)

HUMILITY (a kneeling person)

FOCUS ON PEOPLE (a person showing his positive attitute giving a hand to peaople around)

RESPECT (a person with a head bowed keeping his hat in his hands)

RESULTS (a person with a basket of fruit = fruit of his work)

INNOVATION (a person who just got an idea with his impressed face and upward gesture of his hands)

The figures I would transform into sculptures similar to kariatida wellknown in ancient Greece = sculptures fulfilling the role of the columns – would be in my mind organized into a circle –like in an ancient greek temple – one of them would be missing – exactly the one in the middle of the picture where the observer looking at it will be standing – it means he will just by watching become one of them, one of the „values bearer“, „temple´s supporter“ – team member...

Another modification just to make simplier those figures I thought to put the only one figure in the middle which would represent a person being lit by several lights form different sides, different angles (similar to our perception of a human character - only we can say we know a person, if we had a chance to meet him in different situations, different view angles. Of course that person will perform in different way, but his/her character is a mosaic of all those behaviors. So similarly the shadows dropped around our figure will be all different showing that the person is following all our various different values, I was thinking to express every value by a different shadow (shadow´s shape would be from my previous figural idea). It would look like this in my mind:

There was the complication of too difficult task express the figure to be clear what does it represents without any words and to it in shadow?!?! May be even unrealistic...Moreover I had to admit an objection that the shadow is used in many philosophies to express something negative - "shadowy" side and on the contrary - our values are all positive so it would be misused in this case. (There is one philosophy by the way dealing exactly with this problem - how can happen that even a positive feature might plunge into the shadow if the society doesn´t recognize it at the moment despite the feature remains positive - being ignored it is in a shadowy side.
Despite of this I somehow fell in love with this shadowy idea, I couldn´t get rid of it for a long time although later on  it appeared to be too complicated, too risky for realisation as the figures might look grotesque if the expression will not be hit accurately.

The third idea I came up with was the tree, It eliminated those previous objections and brought more natural concept into my thinking. It started to be sure: we will have to use some writing in the picture so that it would be clear what we want to say.
Why the tree? May be because I wanted to say the values are coming from our base, from our "roots" I was limited by my imagination to keep the writing in the lower part although there was a problem with reading, problem with a space:

Somewhere in this part of the process there came the idea about the size of the painting. It was clear it should be slightly bigger tham human figure not only to reach a strong influence on the viewer but at the same time there was a winner between 4 alternatives of the painting future position within the office interior - the end of a very long corridor where everybody must pass around and has enough time to look and think ... Also maybe somewhere in this phase  we started to feel the necessity of a dynamic movement in this philosophy. 

That´s why there came an idea to present it in a form of the short animation which would be an attractive visual mean.

My idea and scenario for the animation:

animation result: