Demystifying the arts: sharing in-depth industry knowledge to create great pieces of art, architecture & design.

Many years ago, when I started my journey into creative fields as a young person, I found myself confused.

It was admirable to see how great musicians, pop starts, fashion designers, artists and architects could create such magic. I loved the feeling it gave me and that it gave to the people I loved.

My first creative love was music and dance. The happiest moments I had were shared creating, listening to or sharing music. I was also surrounded and filled by a love of literature, my father's passion for poetry and my mother's love for nostalgic films.

Eventually, I became enthralled with the evocative magic of fashion, music shows and incredible environments. It brought me joy to see them, to feel them, and I wanted to create the same for others.

The power I saw it had, art that is, was to bring people together. By evoking feelings, universal, and powerful, we were all connected. It had the ability to lighten up even the darkest of moments. It was, to me, a refuge in sad and scary times, and it was too for so many others around me. I fell in love with the feeling. The joyous celebratory feeling that brought people together if only for a little while.

But that thing that made It so wonderful was also what made it seem so inaccessible:

How does it work? How can I do that?

I had an extraordinary opportunity to become an architect at a young age. Really over nothing more than my mother telling me I wanted to be one, I drifted away from music and performance into something more practical. I managed, however, to stay connected to all the multiple art-forms I loved.

In my early student years I ended up in a position where my firsts jobs where writing for a culture magazine and as an apprentice at an architecture studio. By the time I was 23 I had built more than most most of my tutors, and had led the production and art direction of an important magazine in Venezuela.

When I first was faced with architecture I found it cryptic and hard to understand. What is space? How do you model it? And how do the great pieces of art in the world come to be?

With the years I learned to “speak” design, to know what a material could mean in a place, to carve space and light, to sculpt places and how to feel inside them. Architecture is filled with rigor, it requires accuracy, discipline and perseverance. To commit to a product and try multiple times until you find it, and very often, to be committed to being wrong.

As I learned the rigor of architecture, I craved going back into more expressive forms. Art produced magazines in collaborations with musicians, artists and architects; created immersive events with artists and eventually even helped the production of film projects. I found the immediacy of these projects and how close they were to people fascinating and inspiring.

As I grew more in the architecture apprentice, participating in multiple creative projects on the side, my home country of Venezuela neared its collapse. My journey as a migrant took me to many places in the world, from Europe to Asia to the Americas. Always seeking to understand how people connected, how they expressed themselves through what they wore, how they moved, what they danced to, what their cities look like. This, eventually, led me to the fascinating world of craftsmanship. That was a different level of magic.

Nothing other than practicality and search for a great career led me to London. There, the admiration for culture and the arts was incredible, so much legacy and meaning, vibrant streets with electronic art and music. I could not help but notice that “the high arts” and crafts seemed somehow detached, disconnected from people and their everyday life.

My relationship to creativity for a while was made out of two sides of the same coin: to work during the day using my methodology, perseverance and rigor to build buildings that I did not feel close to, or moving to people.

On the other hand collaborating with extraordinary artists and musicians and creating immersive art parties, or supporting renowned artists in creating sculptures with the House of Loewe. I was in depth in the world of fashion and craftsmanship.

Finally, a wonderfully inspiring opportunity landed on my lap, the brief for Maggie’s Leeds. A project that Heatherwick Studio had been wanting to get off the ground but had not managed to find a way to marry the design aspiration, the specific practicalities of making it happen, and to create a distinctive moving environment for people in a fragile state: dealing with psychological and emotional consequences of cancer.

The ask was to “create a home that people would not dear build for themselves” and a place to provide respite and “not lose the hope of living from the fear of dying”. For the next 4.5 years - supported by an extraordinary team inside and out of Heatherwick Studio - I lead the redesign, strategy and development of the project. The goal was to evoque a feeling, of warmth, support and embrace. A space that could connect with the core of people and give them hope in some of their darkest times.

The building slowly turned into more than a building, it was a stage for people, with art, landscape, objects and craftsmanship coming together to create a home. The task of creating it went from. Imagining big, to carving structural details; from choosing the right fabrics to envisioning which plants would sit where. By connecting with the feelings of the team, everyone added a wonderful piece to the puzzle, making the space richer that much more beautiful.

During this journey, I figured out how to combine things that rarely happen together: forming a big vision for an idea, with the strategic and methodical thinking to make it happen (and a bit of gold-dust). This took me to lead the thinking for big cities aiming to bring communities together, to imagine the future of mobility, to creating compassionate spaces for people needing respite in discreet circumstances. I was invited to promote creativity as a jury member of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.

One of the many beautiful things Maggie’s does as a charity is bringing extraordinary pieces of architecture for free to people who need inspiration and hope the most. After a wonderful time bringing Maggie’s Leeds to life, I realised I wanted to use what I had learned to bring people closer, not just to design, but to the arts.

So in 2019 I decided to redesign my creative balance, creating my own multi-disciplinary projects while also helping people create theirs, to demystify some of the magic of taking an intention into reality.

It is my dream to reach as many people as possible and share insights from 15 years of experience working across the arts and design; from the. Big thinking it takes to conceive an extraordinary idea to the practical thinking to make it happen. From conceiving ideas, finding what they look like to connecting with the right people to support them.

I want to bring in-depth knowledge of the creative industries to people’s inboxes, without the fees of an expensive design studio. I want as many people to find joy and freedom in creation as I can, and to break the barrier that prevents incredible art and design to reach everyone in the planet.

I want to answer the question "How can I do that?" for many others. Will you help me bring my vision to life?