A pair of sneakers featuring a design by Cesaria Evora, the voice of Morna and a Cape Verdean cultural icon, is featured on Marilson Tavares’s Instagram page, where her shoe customization art is growing in popularity.
Merilson, 20, works as a gardener at the Cape Verdean parliament in Praia, but since childhood he has impressed everyone around him with his drawings and paintings.
He grew up dreaming of being a “great artist,” but a lack of income put a stop to his dream, leaving restoration and painting of sneakers as a visible sign of his passion, which he signs off online as “Arte Dnox Crioulo Official.” .
After completing his 12th year, he signed up to study drawing and painting in 2022, but did not complete.
“I finally gave up” due to lack of money to pay for tuition and transportation, he says regretfully, because I wanted to “gain knowledge” and experience working with others who were also dedicated to the arts.
Despite the obstacles, he maintains his ambitions thanks to the special motivation he received as a child: “Some people didn’t believe it, but my teacher trusted me so much that she told me that one day I would be able to achieve my dream. And I don’t want to give up.”
Thanks to his well-known vocation, some friends started suggesting that he apply art to ready-to-wear or footwear, and thus he began a career in which social media became his main showcase.
Marilson lives in his mother’s house in Varzea, one of the central districts of Praia, in a room still under construction, occupied by a single table with brushes, acrylic paints and an “airbrush” (the name given to a painting machine). and a hair dryer.
Nearby stands a shoe shelf almost full of orders not only from Cape Verde, but also from Portugal and France.
“When I started creating realistic designs for clients’ shoes, I saw that they were not satisfied. It’s a huge task,” he says, and the problem is compounded by a lack of resources to “purchase all the equipment.”
“I have an airbrush, but it’s weak, the work doesn’t turn out the way I want, and clients want perfection,” so whenever possible he saves money to invest in the business.
It takes four hours to design a pair of shoes, whether it’s a sunflower design or someone’s face. Besides Size (Cesaria), in the sneakers that he had already sold, Amilcar Cabral, the founder of independence, was an icon that had already been painted.
Characters from history appear alongside comic book characters, and each setting costs three thousand escudos (27 euros), an “affordable price” given the balance between the country’s economic crisis and the demands of art.