Art by Mandelsage
I've always been quite erratic, somehow, in my approach to creating art - doing what I want, in the moment; whatever feels good, impulsively - whatever I feel the need to express, perhaps just like most artists. So this is my best attempt at classifying certain periods in my artistic journey.
The Experimental Phase with Fractals
Like most artists, I didn't consider myself an artist in the first few years. My thing had always been maths and programming. I enjoyed the sciences, and science fiction. I started creating images that I recognised as somehow unique, both from the rest of the psychedelic fractal imagery I saw online, and from all the previous tinkering I had done with them. But still... Me? An artist? It felt weird to think of myself that way.
In those years, I created pieces like "Fury", "Sound Garden", "Symmetrophilia" and "Estrelium" - pieces that had no rudder whatsoever on the way to their completion. I was just a fractal nerd, enjoying myself. ("Fury" came to mean a lot afterwards, when I realised that it captured perfectly what I had been going through at that time.)
The More Intentional Phase with Fractals
After some time, I got to know the software I used better (Mandelbulb 3D and JWildFire). With that came increased confidence in attempts to create artworks born of preconceived ideas, and not only chance discoveries of order in the chaos of fractals. I decided I wanted to create art that would inspire people to feel more excited about science. "Nascentia", "Didn't Planet", "Abiogenesis", "Eclipse Mélange", "Space 2000", "Tangentia", "Multiverse Foam" and "Coalescence" - independent pieces that all share the same theme of science and/or space - were all created in these years.
Also, it was at this time that I watched the series "Cosmos" with Neil deGrasse Tyson and was blown away by it. The first episode inspired me greatly, which led to the creation of "The Eye of Giordano" - one of my most important pieces to this day.
Crypto First Contact
In the middle of 2018, I entered a new phase. I had heard of bitcoin many years before but only really paid attention at the end of 2017. Somewhere in the following months I started posting on Steemit (today's "Hive"), intrigued by the idea that I could earn money for writing (something I've always enjoyed) and showing off my new hobby - art made with fractals.
The problem though, is that the blogging community took over a little bit. I became much more focused on making sure I had three good articles a week, than on improving my art. I also started working on a Fractal Mandalas colouring book, and in 2019, I started a new job which took most of my time. With 2020 came the pandemic - a year of personal turmoil as my marriage ended.
Still, before that, I managed to create a few key pieces (notably, the second Cosmos piece, Galápagos, my self-portrait "Artiface", and "A Place to Start"), and even got into animating a bit with my Orb Et Al collection (two pieces seen top left and right). I minted most of my previous years' work at that point (between Dec 2018 and Feb 2019) on Makersplace - mostly in editions of 5. And I even had my first sale that year - BitBuzz (@CryptoSteveWand on Twitter) bought my "ETH-tropy" piece (my very first animation, seen above, center) for 1 ETH, which at the time was ~$168.
The NFT Spring
In fact, I missed participating in most of the NFT-Spring because of the new job. But at the end of 2020, I started creating and minting again on MakersPlace, and one October Sunday morning, I woke up to see my Covid-inspired "Virus-X" had been sold for its list price of 1.618ETH (about 750USD).
At the same time, my "Thonnath-nu-Fuin" (unsold to this day!) was chosen together with Kristy Glas and A.L. Crego pieces in a community vote in MakersPlace. Our prize was to exhibit a new series of works together in a virtual gallery. I had already started with a series of 5 pieces called "The First", and so I completed it and exhibited them. They were sold out in a month.
"The First" was a turning point for me creatively because it was the first time I attempted to create non-abstract pieces using fractals. The story of an ancient alien species that only existed to observe and archive everything in the known universe had been in my mind for years, and I was very happy to finally start telling it.
In the months that followed (Jan - April 2023) I sold many more pieces on MakersPlace, and importantly, two animations on Terra Virtua (just "Virtua" now). They were "Nuclear" and "Time Crystal", which sold for $2200 and $2000 respectively. I mention the sale prices specifically because those were my two largest sales to date.
Crypto Love
In the beginning of 2021 I met Alejandra Her via Twitter, with whom I immediately had a strong connection. It is difficult to overstate how wonderful it was, finding a person with whom I shared so much and with whom I felt so comfortable.
Meeting her changed everything, including my creative drive. I created the "Her" collection (5 pieces, seen below), inspired entirely by her and our months of discovering each other. I went on to create the "Nothing Is Sacred" collection (9 pieces), the "Rorschaos" collection (10 pieces), Nanovirus (a sequel of sorts to "Virus-X"), the "Tall Ship" for the Sail the Stars blueprint, the third Cosmos piece, "Nullius In Verba", and 3 gift-pieces for her. That was only 2021.
2022 was a chaotic year for me. I moved to Venezuela and my creative work was all over the place. I created my first blueprint, Infiniverse, which was an extension of the story of "The First". The on-going collections "Benoit" and "The Crypto Gods" were born, on MakersPlace and SuperRare respectively. And I finally did a collab with my friend and fellow artist George Boya - "Abeona" - a sci-fi piece that may or may not be part of the "The First" story.
Code and A.I.
Art-wise, something changed with me, and in the space in general, after A.I. gained popularity in the form of MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, Dalle-2, etc, and ChatGPT.
Alejandra and I created "@cryptoyevsky" on Twitter and started writing about A.I. on Hive, as we experimented with MidJourney. We did that to keep the obviously different style of work separate from our mutual styles. I've found A.I. to be incredibly enabling for creativity in ways that just wouldn't have been possible otherwise. We created an entire Async blueprint with MJ ("Mary Shelley's Notebook") as well as a collection of nine 1/1s called "Cyclus Renascentiae".
I also began an immensely fun project called "Down the Rabbit Hole" using A.I. exclusively, with Midjourney's old "Test" algorithm, which is on hold for now.
But the most important part of the A.I. "revolution" for me was, I got back into coding very fast with the help of ChatGPT (March 2023). My coding brain reactivated in full force and I've been thoroughly enjoying the juxtaposition of creativity and logic in the process =)
I completed "Eye-Am" as well as "Ars Fractalia", two generative art works published and still available on @ProhibitionArt (see below) ..
Which brings us to the present moment (Feb 2024). I have completed yet two more generative works - "mindprints" and another with the WIP title "portals" which I plan on publishing very soon.
P.S.
Here is a video - an interview done in early 2021 - in which I really go deep into my art and how I get started. Only for the brave ;P (1 hour).