Many international campaigns have shown that the worlds of business and art can link together successfully. Jo Caruana discovers one local example.
Sleek, white cats wearing designer sunglasses, a magnificent horse inspecting a luxurious handbag and silk scarf and a beautiful figure dripping in diamonds.
These are just three of the striking graphics created by designer and illustrator Nadine Noko to front a campaign by luxury goods purveyors Edwards, Lowell – a family company that tries to stay very true to its Maltese roots.
Malcolm Lowell, the managing director at Edwards, Lowell, approached Noko having seen some of her work at her recent exhibition, Two Heads And a City. The two struck up an artistic synergy and began work on the campaign, which was unveiled earlier this year with more illustrations planned for the near future.
“I was instantly drawn to Nadine’s ability to give cult appeal to so many different aspects of life in Malta and beyond. I asked her to create something world class that would stand out and I believe she has delivered,” Lowell says.
Asked why there is such a connection between art and retail, Noko explains that shopping is largely an emotional decision.
“Artists tap into something that is there but that the majority of people ignore. Thus an artistic campaign will likely be able to stand alone and prove more memorable,” she says.
The artist recollects many successful marketing collaborations between art and commerce over the years.
“Everyone remembers Toulouse Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge posters, for instance. Plus there was Andy Warhol’s campaign for the Edelman Leather Company and his classic ‘This is A Chair’ advert,” she says
And there have been umpteen others. For starters, the Chupa-Chups logo was designed in 1969 by Salvador Dali and is still used today, while a more recent collaboration to spring to mind is French illustrator Jean Jullien’s unforgettable adverts for Transport for London.
Local artists are still at the stage where they expect the government to fund their projects
Another good example is the iconic Shepard Fairey Obama poster, which was first created independently, then endorsed by the Obama campaign and later bought by the Smithsonian.
With all of that in mind, Noko explains that collaborations between art and commerce are quite common in the UK and the US, but not really in Malta, yet.
She goes on to cite some of her favourite commercial collaborations that big international brands, including Nike, Adidas and Coca Cola developed with the ‘Beautiful Losers’ (a group of American artists) from the mid-1990s till today. “They are probably some of the best adverts ever created,” she says. “Malta is still pre-1990s in that aspect.
“On the one hand companies tend to opt for safer campaigns. However, it has to be said that there is also some resistance from the artists’ points of view. Perhaps, they are afraid of being seen as too commercial and not intellectual enough.”
Noko believes that many local artists are still at the stage where they expect the government to fund their projects or exhibitions through programmes like the Malta Arts Fund. “As a norm, we create the work, present it in a gallery, people come to visit and that’s it.
“A couple of years ago the Creative Economy was set up to help move the industry away from that fixed way of doing things, but it will take time to change the status quo. Hopefully, projects like this one will move things along and inspire others to collaborate too.”
Asked about her inspiration for the Edwards, Lowell campaign, Noko says that after a series of discussions with Lowell and his team, they chose to hark back to the Mad Men years and Irving Penn simplicity, when fashion used illustration as much as photography.
“I wanted to give a feel for the product’s form and beauty, so no extra brush stroke was kept. In that respect, even the media I used was a mix of old school watercolours and digital processing.”
Those elements, the artist says, represent a reflection of the products’ design.
“I focused on the elegance of the way the pearls hang compared to the beauty of a woman’s back. The sleekness of a cat and the way we feel when we wear a pair of glasses that makes us feel confident. ”
“It is sometimes hard to blend the worlds of commerce and art. Commerce often pulls you in one direction while art budges you in the other, but I believe we have managed to link them beautifully in the final result.”