Taiwanese-American artist Huntz Liu works with layered hand-cut paper to produce intricate geometric pieces.
Liu’s work is captivating in its complexity and the way it plays with light, color, shape and composition. His artworks are composed of several layers that are meticulously cut and arranged into vibrant geometric structures.
He often chooses bold colors like reds, oranges and yellows, to contrast with softer pastel hues and create dynamic compositions with a sense of movement.
“Creative people face more regular rejection than just about anyone else on the planet,” he tells Creative Boom. Palmer estimates that LOVE, whose star client list includes Jim Beam, Nike, and Vogue, loses three times the pitches it wins – and he says that failure rate is pretty standard for creative businesses.
“Failing is simply part of your day-to-day when you work in the creative industries,” he says. “You can pour your heart and soul into a project and apply the best strategy, thinking and design skills, only for a senior or a client to say they don’t like it.”
For Palmer, dealing with this means you have to have the skin of a rhino and be a rubber ball: always ready to bounce back. But Palmer is adamant that having tough skin and a resilient attitude doesn’t mean ignoring your failures or rushing past them. Instead, Palmer advocates for his team of creatives – and the industry at large – to develop a healthier relationship with creative success by being willing to acknowledge and embrace creative losses.
“Handling failure is like going through the five stages of grief,” Palmer tells Creative Boom while recounting a time he got the call about a lost pitch while on holiday in Greece, effectively ruining any chance for some much-needed R&R.
The five stages of grief were originally laid out by psychologist and author Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 1969 as a framework for navigating one’s own end of life. The use of the Kübler-Ross method has been expanded and reconceptualised in many ways over the past 50 years and has been transformed into a powerful tool for confronting loss of all kinds.
According to the trajectory laid out by Kübler-Ross, a griever moves gradually from shock and denial to pleading, bargaining, or desperation, then on to anger – an experience David Palmer of LOVE says he can relate to every time he and his team lose a pitch. “It really can feel like the world is falling down around you, and it’s totally normal to feel really angry in the beginning,” Palmer tells Creative Boom.
As a leader, Palmer thinks it’s healthy to make room for negative emotions – that by accepting the anger that comes with creative rejection or failure, you’re one step closer to accepting the failure and moving on. “It’s useful for young creatives to know that it’s just perfectly natural to feel like that,” Palmer says.