While I’ll always be a painter first and foremost (nothing beats experimenting with the physical mediums of painting), I was excited to be selected as one of the artists for Saatchi Art’s first NFT project. NFT (Non-Fungible Token) collectors purchase a one-of-a-kind blockchain-enabled digital artwork. It’s another art universe, which I don’t quite understand yet. What I can say is the works I’ve seen created by the artists in this project are pretty freakin’ amazing.
The Other Avatars is the first NFT project of its kind, a collection of handmade, originally-designed and stylistically-varied avatars created by 154 international artists selected by Saatchi Art curators. The subject matter is what made me give this a go, the avatars are “inspired by the self-portraits of Vincent van Gogh and the NFT landscape in 2021”.
To create works for the project I took my original portrait paintings of Van Gogh then played with them digitally to make unique NFTs. Actually, I just did the art side and thankfully Saatchi have been taking care of all the tech stuff. The amazing Saatchi Art NFT team has connected curators, artists and technology experts on Discord, provided us with a template and ‘traits’ checker, are minting the ‘tokens’, doing the ‘drop’, helping us set up our ‘wallet’ and answering a gazillion questions.
The Other Avatars | A Saatchi Art NFT Collection goes live on 24 January 2022. saatchiart.com/nft
