art creation and curation
Begoña Salas is an artist from Ecuador. Her amazing artwork draws strength from nature, her roots and womanhood to showcase incredible portraits, elements and landscapes. Get to know her more through her instagram, @begocontomate.
A selection of affordable art pieces with summer vibes. All pieces are linked bellow.
Image 1. Serge Hamad | Temporal Perception #94
Image 2. Paul Fuentes | Miami Beach
Image 3. Mijoo Kim & Minjin kang | The Modern Paradise – Miami Beach 4
Image 4. Daniel Kozeletckiy | Dream of Summer #12 Painting
Image 5. Soo Burnell | Swim Girls at Molitor
Image 6. Ryan James McFarland | Sketchboook
Image 7. Micaiah Carter | Adeline in Barrettes
Image 8. Hayley Sheldon | Beam Small Square
Image 9. Bernhard Lang | Adria V
Image 10. Pierre Toussaint | Underwater Beauty
Image 11. Robert Jahns | Paris Balloons I
Image 12. Bernhard Lang | Adria XI
Image 13. Boglárka Nagy | Gil with a Seagull
Image 14. Arielle Zamora | Hello I Feel the Same
Image 15. Pete McDonald | Soft Ice Cream
Image 16. Gia Coppola | Girl on a Boat
Image 17. Tommy Clarke | Saint Tropez Boats
Ephemera’s inspiration for a cool easy ephemeral summer.
To inaugurate this series of ephemeral art celebrations, we have the pleasure to bring forward a piece of art of many shapes.
This is “Mulher”, the latest work from the singer and song writer Carolina Deslandes, a project that is so much more than a song.
“Mulher” was transformed into a short film, 4 whole songs that compose an album and a beautiful set of images to represent each one of them. The story behind it is the physical and psychological abuse women suffer every day due to the cultural, social and religious beliefs of our society. It’s a very serious matter that we, as society, should be ashamed that it still exists.
Carolina is an active voice in this matter and decided to make it even louder by launching “Mulher” (which translates to “Woman”) on the very same day as the Elimination of Violence Against Women’s Day. In an interview Carolina gave to the Portuguese magazine SAPO Mag, the artist explains that this album represents several generations of women who have suffered domestic violence.
This amazing album is available on Spotify for everyone to listen. Enjoy!
I recently read a really interesting article from AdWeek (I even posted it on my LinkedIn). It was about how many people are afraid of the amount of media available to display on, and think it will compromise the quality of the creative content. And it explained that the new ad industry is not killing creativity, just making more challenging for creators.
I completely agreed with this, and the new Snapchat tool just confirmed it to me.
It seems Snapchat has created its own version of Netflix and YouTube Originals, only much more powerful creatively. As this article by Mark Wilson at Fast Company puts it, “… the company needs to leverage shared experiences to keep its users ping-ponging around the app. Another new interactive element it’s introducing is for reactions”.
Basically, it’s a great innovative way to watch series while interacting with the story, obviously created for millennials and the generations after that. But, what does this mean for the creative industry? I think it means that creativity is finally truly ephemeral.
It means that we have arrived the era where creativity can live freely and be itself without fears or strings because it will only last a moment. It will give creators the opportunity to make mistakes and have small audiences. Or to be famous for 5 seconds because the next day a new creator will have their shot.
Creativity isn’t affected by the new changes in the industry. It’s simply more authentic. It’s more realistic. More real. It’s ephemeral creativity in its purest state. And I can’t wait to see what comes next.
When your creative team tells you they have no ideas, show them Nike.
When your student is having trouble understanding what a brand is, show them Nike.
When your client is missing the creative importance of your pitch, show them Nike.
When your investors don’t believe in your business proposal, show them Nike.
When your boss says copywriters are useless, show them Nike.
When factory like agencies say metrics, metrics, metrics, show them Nike.
When digital says Social Media, SEO, Email Marketing, show them Nike.
When you hear someone saying advertising is over, show them Nike.
When people say they don’t believe in brands anymore, show them Nike.
In case of short minded mentality, severe lack of inspiration or disbelief with the industry, just watch Nike. Just do it.
Yesterday I met an amazing woman: Beliza Coro. When she was a young girl, she was selling fruits and vegetables at the local markets with her family when she got to be a part of Fundación Telefónica’s program Proniño.
This is a program that takes working children off the streets and markets and gives them a chance to have an education and to have the opportunity to decide what they want to do with their lives.
Beliza was a part of this program, along with her sister and many other kids. After graduating high school, she went to law school and was the first girl from her tribe in Ecuador to have graduated the best university of the country with honors.
She has studied in the US and Israel, she has done a master’s degree in London and another one in Madrid. She is currently finishing her PHD classes, and during this whole time after college, she’s been working for the lawyer council of Telefónica.
I had heard about her and her accomplishments before, and this week, through the Consulate of Ecuador in Barcelona, I got the opportunity to meet her, hear about her struggles in life and thank her for inspiring me in pursuing everything I want to do.
In life, I don’t think it’s good to compare other people’s experiences with yourself’s. But I do think it’s important for us to know they exist, to know that there was someone who might have gotten things a bit more difficult for them and managed to get through all that and rise in their lives. And that, although you are in different circumstances, you can do that too.
Beliza Coro is a huge example of achievement and empowerment, of taking the opportunities you get in life and really use them to change your future and shape it however you want.
She is a huge inspiration for me, and a great way to start the “Amazing Women Series” here in the blog.
I’ve worked in a few companies now and I can’t understand something. Hoy is it posible that a start-up that starts with 4 and then 8 and then 10 people creates a “power team” and then, when it reaches 20 or 30, starts hiring people like crazy to do jobs no one wants and paying very little?
I know, this may sound a little harsh, let me explain you what I mean:
Over the time, either through my own experiences or my friends’, I’ve realized that companies that start out with a good idea and very few people do great. They have their team with their key people, which are basically a bunch of everything-doers, which is fine and challenging and exciting, because you’re starting out the project and you have to wait for it to evolve before having a lot of people working for you.
But then, when companies do have money to grow and to invest and to push their business forward, they become organized machines that hire people with a wide profile for very specific tasks. And the worst thing is, they hire people with a lot of good skills, young people that have opportunity to grow and to evolve, but they encapsulate them into one simple mechanic task. They basically take the life out of these people. Why is that?
It can either be writing out HTML code or uploading content to a CMS, or even scheduling social media posts. These tasks are all usually part of someone’s job. But not their entire job. Not all their tasks. Except, in these new companies, they are.
This not only removes any kind of motivation people might have to become a part of a project, but it also leaves them out from every other team in the company, it removes the interaction between departments, because you only speak to your direct boss, who speaks to other bosses in the same level, who have a higher boss that reports to the CEO.
Can’t we be able to find jobs for people where they can grow and become someone in the company? Where they can learn the mechanical tasks, but also have their own opportunity to explore other fields, to integrate themselves in other departments and actually do something meaningful for the business?
Everyone nowadays is obsessed with SEO (I should know, I work with it): if their page is on first position, if they appear first when someone types the brand’s name, if there’s link juice on the page, if the meta descriptions have all the keywords… I mean, I could go on forever.
But, when we talk about SEO, we’re really talking about how people look for information. It’s all about people. And YouTube content creators know all about this: all this time they’ve been doing SEO and we didn’t see it.
When YouTubers put a question in their video’s title, when they do a thumbnail with three words people search a lot, they do it based on one thing: the questions their subscribers ask them in the comments’ section. It’s that simple. It’s basically watching out for people’s thoughts and needs, and answering them.
And it doesn’t matter if we put all of our money into an SEO strategy of if we use shady techniques to build our brand’s online reputation. It won’t work until we start to look at our audience, look at what they need, what they ask, what they want to know, and fulfill that void.
I think us, ad people, have lost ourselves among so many platforms, metrics and digital somethings that we’ve forgot what we’ve been doing for so long with a lot less tools: communicating and getting through to people in a special way.
That’s the lesson YouTubers and other content creators have come to teach us. That they survive because they are relevant to people. And maybe we should stop using their platforms so much and start facing the real challenge in this industry: making our brands relevant on their own.
The concept of urban creativity isn’t just about street fashion, irreverent ideals or young kids dressing like hip-hop stars. Urban creativity is about culture. And, as people, we’re all a part of culture.
Luckily for us, there’s all kinds of different cultures not even around the world (which there also is), but in our own neighborhoods. Which means there are different ways of expressing ourselves and our inner self, according to our culture. And it seems Dr. Martens agrees with this concept.
The brand has created “Worn Different”, an ad that makes everyone, from every culture, feel included. This goes to show that not the brand is incredibly versatile, but also that urban creativity really is for everyone to enjoy.
See you next time,
