A Petition to Bring Back Field Trips (and Other Reflections from My Recent Art Museum Visit)
TLDR: I skipped job hunting for a morning to visit the Birmingham Museum of Art. A panel about Japonisme (the sweeping influence Japanese art had on French Impressionism) stopped me cold and reminded me that the best creative work rarely looks like pure invention. It looks like someone paying close attention to something outside their world and having the nerve to bring it home.
Step Back
I took a break from all things Job Hunting™ this morning to visit the Birmingham Museum of Art and take in the Monet to Matisse exhibit.
Here's the thing about standing in front of a Monet: the work looks loose up close.
Chaotic, even.
Individual brushstrokes that seem to go nowhere.
It's only when you step back that the whole picture clicks into place and suddenly you can't imagine it painted any other way.
The Panel I Almost Walked Past
In the exhibit, there was a panel on the wall I almost walked past. It was about Japonisme (a word I'd never heard before), which describes the sweeping influence Japanese art had on French painters in the late nineteenth century.
In 1853, Japan ended 220 years of self-isolation and began trading with the outside world. Japanese ceramics, silk paintings, and woodblock prints flooded into European markets. Artists like Monet, Mary Cassatt, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec didn't just notice. They collected obsessively. They were transformed by it.
You can see it throughout the exhibit if you know what to look for: the flat perspectives, the stylized florals, the bold contrasting colors, the unusual framing. Work that feels distinctly French and is also unmistakably Japanese. A collision that produced something neither tradition had done before.
Creative Risk Rarely Looks Like Invention
That's the thing about creative risk that doesn't get said enough: it rarely looks like pure invention. More often it looks like someone who paid close attention to something outside their world and had the nerve to bring it home with them.
The Impressionists weren't just experimenting with light. They were pulling from a tradition most of their peers weren't even looking at, applying it to their own work, and producing something that confused and frustrated people at the time. Now we stand in front of it with our mouths open and our cameras out.
Borrowing Brilliantly
The marketing campaigns I'm proudest of came from the same impulse: borrowing a format from somewhere unexpected, applying it to a new context, and trusting that the tension would land. A retargeting ad styled after early 2000s anti-piracy PSAs. Demand gen events built around wine instead of webinars.
You can't manufacture that instinct by staying inside your own category. You have to go look at things that have nothing to do with your job.
Every marketer probably needs a field trip like this every few months.
Take this as my formal request to bring back field trips.
Katie Frank is a B2B SaaS growth marketer based in Birmingham, AL. She writes about marketing and travel at katiefrankmarketing.com
