Mistakes, chaos and meditation: inside the mind of Bráulio Amado

It’s Nice That: One of the best parts of your talk at Nicer Tuesdays was when you talked about finding ideas in unexpected places where other people might not look. Why do you think these boring, dismissed details are so interesting to you, and other creative people?

Bráulio Amado: I feel like nowadays we spend a whole day looking at a computer, completely bombarded with information and then when we leave the computer, we’re looking at our phones. Around us there’s architecture, there’s ads, there’s all this stuff that’s so designed… so this practice of looking at the damaged and mundane things that I would usually ignore was like a meditation, in a way, to avoid looking at all this stuff that’s constantly trying to get our attention. There’s an exercise in trying to stop and force yourself to look at something you would usually dismiss, and reflect a little bit on what it is. Even if it’s something that’s purely functional or boring, I feel like there’s always something in there – especially when it comes to, like, stuff on the street that’s been destroyed or abraded. Often, I feel like something bad or ugly creates really cool textures.

INT: Do you think it’s your way of dealing with the chaos and noise of the city – rather than trying to take in everything, to zoom in feels calming in a way?

BA: As a person who grew up in a city, I find it very exciting and very familiar. But because it’s so familiar I feel like it’s a cool exercise to try to look at it in an abstract way and look at the things that you’re so used to, like look at the sidewalk and try to see this from a different perspective. Obviously this is nothing new – I feel like there’s so many people in art that have done these exercises like Duchamp, John Cage… it’s about trying to look at what’s already there in a different way.

With the Good Room posters, because I’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands at this point, it got to the point where I didn’t know what to do anymore! So just going through my phone and looking at the silly things I photographed on the street, and using them as a basis for a poster, became like a game – like, okay, I have this photo of a napkin, what can I make from this? Even if in the end it doesn’t look like a napkin, I have to do something with this. Obviously being a club poster lends itself to a lot of different things – music, dancing, darkness, it’s sweaty, people are drunk, so I feel like I can make it super weird and it still matches what a club could be.

INT: It’s quite expressive to design for…

BA: Which is funny because sometimes clients ask for a similar thing, I’m like okay, but you’re not a club, you’re a beauty brand. I can’t just go on the streets and photograph trash, it doesn’t make sense!

But the fun of it is that it’s an exercise, that I try to make it hard for myself. Often, I can see what it’s going to be right away, but that makes it too easy and you’re just executing. The ones I have more fun with are where you don’t quite see it and have to explore and find something in it. It’s been very helpful for me even applying that mindset and logic to other works, because sometimes when you read a brief, you have ideas and it’s visual, but oftentimes it’s not. So it’s about dissecting it, and researching etc, and then you have everything in front of you and it’s like, alright what can I do with all this.

INT: Is there any specific projects you can think of apart from the posters, where you feel like this more experimental visual approach played a big part?

BA: I think the record covers definitely end up going there too. Often there’s a moodboard but it’s usually all over the place, so it’s just me reacting to the music or riffing off the title and researching different meanings to the title and playing with it. And everyone reacts to music differently, so often I share an idea of what they want, and then a sketch for another idea that might not be exactly what they asked for, but I explain why think it makes sense based on my research and experiments. This is also a collaborative project, so I’m opening up the game and saying “we can go this way and this way,” then the artist is involved in the project too. We’re both experimenting and seeing where it goes. Plus then we involve photographers and more people in the project. So record covers are a little world of exploring, similar to the posters, but because it’s not just me, it feels cooler and richer, in a way.

INT: That makes sense, to bounce off other people. I guess it depends on the team because there’ll be creative people out there that feel like every time they try and do this, it’s sort shut down.

BA: I mean that still happens a lot, yeah! But it’s part of what we do I guess. That’s where the Good Room’s posters are very helpful because I reuse ideas for myself since they don’t want it. But ultimately it’s not like I’m trying to do something that represents my work, I’m mostly just excited to be delivering, especially if it’s a band, like whatever you have in mind, I want to make sense with your artwork. But there’s also bands that don’t really have an idea of what they want their album to look like, so then it just becomes fun to figure it out together.