The Pentimento Factor – who have you painted over?

A portrait of a mystery woman lay hidden beneath a painting from Pablo Picasso’s famed Blue Period.  With the help of advanced imaging technology, conservators at the Courtauld Institute of Art in Britain have discovered the figure under the “Portrait of Mateu Fernández de Soto.”

In painting, this is an example of what is called a pentimento: “the presence or emergence of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over.”  It is also described as a “painter’s repentance” – a sign that the artist changed their mind from their original idea.

I like to use this phenomenon as an analogy of how sometimes as leaders, we “paint over” a team member.  We may want them to be a certain way, exude certain traits or attributes and lose sight of who they are at their essence – sometimes obscuring their greatest strengths.

We, of course, do it to ourselves as well.  Wanting to appear a certain way, appease others, and go against our natural instincts and suddenly wake up one day with a “who am I?”

Everyone wants to be seen and heard for who they truly are. It serves us all to occasionally pause and ask – am I seeing and appreciating this colleague or recreating them to be someone they are not.