If a picture speaks a thousand words, then a Fluevog ad speaks them in all sorts of different accents and tongues. Some of our best are created by Fluevogers just like you. Forever in awe of your wicked talent, we spent some time getting to know a few of our latest FluevogCreative winners a little better.
Oksana Globa | Calgary, AB
What does being an artist mean to you?
Being an artist and designer means being up all night when ideas make me restless until they get executed. It also means understanding that perfectionism is your weakness, however you can’t imagine yourself being less caring about your work.
What gets your creative juices flowing?
I get inspiration mostly from other designers/artists. It provides a powerful connection when you are visiting their exhibitions, communicating with them or watching their interviews.
It also means being an admirer of different nicely designed (crafted) things. Among all the modern websites and outstanding online portfolios, which absolutely motivate me to create something great, I also enjoy simple things. For example I like to collect nice stickers and badges. No matter how old they are or where they came from, they give me an additional source of inspiration.
What’s the strangest art project you’ve been apart of?
It was my second year of my bachelor’s degree in Ukraine in a class of animation. I was creating a short classic animated cartoon for a children’s camp. The weird and the most fun part was the media I ended up painting my story on a 3 metre long wallpaper. The script went on like this: an enormous perogy is floating down from the sky right into a folk character’s mouth, propelled by his willpower. The script of the animation was based on a traditional tale by a famous Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol.
Haley Grison | Chicago, IL
What does being an artist mean to you?
For me, being an artist means being able to aid others in understanding an idea, theme, or even message set out by a client. In most situations, a visual representation is the solution to capturing a specific audience; that’s where artists like myself come in. I create art as a problem-solving device to connect a targeted public with the group that seeks their attention.
What gets your creative juices flowing?
My passion evolves from inspirations I gather from the environments and artists I come across. When I encounter breathtaking landscapes, funky new music, or fellow artists and their creative processes, I become encouraged and motivated to produce something equally as captivating in my own style.
What’s the strangest art/design project you’ve been apart of?
Although it may sound biased, I’d still have to say creating a shoe advertisement for Fluevog was the most peculiar and fantastic project I’ve worked on thus far. Being able to take full creative control and design an ad how I envisioned it to look was such an incomparable adventure and I am so grateful for that experience. From start to finish, I enjoyed every moment of the project including the voting process and waiting in anticipation for results.
Miriam Martincic | Sugar Grove, NC
What does being an artist mean to you?
Being an artist connects me to myself. Making art is repeatedly asking and answering the question, “What do you want?” The answer is not someone else’s vision, not my vision yesterday, but what is my vision in this present moment? Each moment requires its own answer which is why an artist never finishes making their work. It’s a lifetime of practice, a long game.
Being a designer is about solving other people’s problems and meeting their needs. Working on someone else’s schedule imposes closure and letting go which is a nice contrast. Plus, it gets me out of my head which inevitably leads to new perspective in my own work.
Art takes me inside myself; design takes me outside of myself. The two practices refresh and balance each other.
What gets your creative juices flowing?
Paying attention is everything. Art starts with a spark, but that spark can be anything—all things dachshund, colors in different light, feeling slumped on a low-energy day.
What’s the strangest project you’ve been a part of?
In a community of artists, spontaneous participation in performance art and photo shoots is an unavoidable. When I was a resident artist at Skowhegan in Maine, I was a “model” for a video. My job was to lie on the floor under a pile of colorful foam blobs, move randomly, and make the foam shapes undulate.
Want to join the prestigious ranks of our FluevogCreative winners? Head over to FluevogCreative and let your inner artist run wild!
