For their forthcoming campaign, Swedish footwear kings Happy Socks enlisted Snoop’s creative team, Cashmere Agency to explore The Art Of Inspiration with their latest music collaborator. The short film opens with stark shots of an all-white studio space; fluorescent lights switch on to reveal blank canvases, and the camera slowly pans to a white table covered with brushes and paints. Snoop Dogg’s unmistakable voice coolly speaks over the montage: “I’ve always felt like painting was something I wanted to do, but I just never had time to do it.”
News began trickling in about the rapper’s forays into visual art in February this year when his Versace-inspired painting – created overnight at the Palazzo Versace in Australia – sold for $10,200. With “The Art of Inspiration”, Snoop is pushing his new passion further, using painting as yet another way to express himself creatively.
“Sometimes the music in my life don't explain exactly what I'm going through, so [painting] is another piece of the puzzle,” – Snoop Dogg
“Sometimes the music in my life don't explain exactly what I'm going through, so [painting] is another piece of the puzzle,” he reveals in the film, while shirt-lessly throwing paint at the canvases across the room. Snoop’s instinctive artwork has a tangible feeling of spontaneity and an untamed, almost childlike, imagination, not too unlike the playful energy of Happy Socks’ own bright designs.
True to form, Happy Socks collaborations always allow the artist to really let loose in their art form however they see fit, without any parameters or censors (certainly not in the case of their collab with David LaChappelle). Not only will Snoop be working on a larger abstract painting project as part of “The Art of Inspiration”, he’ll also be designing a line of limited edition socks that highlight three different sides of him: Painter Snoop, Rastafarian Snoop, and "Gin and Juice” Snoop. This November, his Happy Sock exclusive box set will leave, as he puts it himself: “a piece of Snoop that we can take with us forever."
