Veen Art by Kaj Stenvall at Harrods

I would like to share a press release by a Finnish company Veen Waters, who are doing some great challenger marketing in the category of bottled waters. Competing with the giants such as Evian, San Pellegrino, Coca-cola, Voss and others, Veen is outperforming in true quality of water, design, corporate citizenship, sustainability, creativity and being different.

They’ve done design awards, top fashion cooperation and exclusive channel deals. Now they get into art and charity.

Read on and check out a video interview with artish Kaj Stenvall.

Finland’s best known contemporary artist Kaj Stenvall is now the new VEEN Art – artist. Stenvall’s quirkily named “VEEN Art – Better than a cookie!” painting on VEEN bottles world premiers at Harrods in Knightsbridge, London. The painting is a contribution to the VEEN Art charity collection and is made available for consumers on the numbered special edition VEEN bottles at Harrods and in poster form at the VEEN and Stenvall websites.

All funds to charity

The charity VEEN bottles are sold exclusively at Harrods and all funds raised will be donated for London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in the autumn of 2009. “This is a great opportunity for us to bring joy to so many children, doing what we do best,” says Kaj Stenvall.

What is VEEN Art?

VEEN Art is a concept featuring famous artists and designers bringing VEEN Water into their creations. The artist has full artistic integrity to complete the work. “We want to raise talk with artists to create awareness and money for good causes,” says Tomi Grönfors, MD of VEEN Waters Finland Oy.
 

”Better than a cookie!” by Kaj Stenvall

The painting features a duck familiar from Stenvall’s earlier works. Water is playing the leading role and is featured in three forms: in a glass, in the sea and in tears. The tears are there out of pure joy and enjoyment of sipping VEEN. It is hard to say whether the duck is laughing or crying for the water being so smooth. 

Kaj Stenvall first came to attention of the Finnish art scene about ten years ago when he began to paint a very familiar-looking duck in a variety of settings. Stenvall asserts that this character has been developed by himself, even while acknowledging its similarity to the most famous duck in the world. The scenes in his pictures are from the world at large and his duck often appears in absurd, if recognizably generic, settings. There really is nothing in his paintings that one can put their finger on to connect them to any particular corner of the world, especially not to Finland, except perhaps a specific intensity of angst and foreboding.