Ray Brand

What a slow creativity retreat can do for you We are living in the age of the fast creative. Ship it. Iterate. Post. Produce. The algorithm rewards consistency, the market rewards speed, and somewhere in the relentless pressure to keep generating, the most essential thing — the quiet internal act of actually making something — gets trampled. The irony is that the faster you move, the less interesting the work becomes. Not always. But often enough that it's worth paying attention to. WHAT...

Join us for a creative community retreat Ask anyone who has attended an art retreat what surprised them most about the experience, and the answer is almost never the instruction. Almost never the setting, as extraordinary as the setting often is. The answer, consistently and across every kind of creative background, is the people. Specifically: how quickly they became important, and how long they stayed that way. This surprises most people before they go. It surprises no one who has actually...

Between the red cliffs of the Massif de l'Estérel and the Gulf of Cannes, eight miles west of the city most people come here for, sits a town that most visitors to the French Riviera never find. Mandelieu-La Napoule is not on the glossy itinerary. It doesn't have a casino or a film festival. What it has is two miles of sandy beach, a medieval château perched above the Mediterranean, a harbor full of fishing boats and sailing yachts, and the particular unhurried quality of a Riviera town that...