Who are you?
I’m not sure anymore. Harvey McFly is one of my digital identities.
When did you start making art?
I am in my 40s and I’ve explored many different media during the years but I’ve never considered myself an artist. I’m just a curious mind constantly looking for new challenges.
Why do you make art?
Learning new skills is probably my main drive but I also enjoy spreading some irony and nonsense. Too many people take things too seriously. We probably evolved too much and got distracted by concepts like god, right and wrong, alive and dead, rich and poor, tall and short, left and right, white and black etc. Our natural tendency to dichotomies is depriving us of the ability to enjoy shades and art can be a powerful tool to put us in front of our limits, fears and contradictions, restoring a healthy sense of insignificance in relation to the complexities of this universe.
What would you call your style?
A constantly evolving experimentation that does not like to be constrained by its own history. Bad to establish a recognizable style, good to keep me interested and happy.
What is the process for creating one of your artworks?
The pyramids series was born as an exercise to learn 3D animation. The first pyramid was fundamentally conceptual and did not have a theme. After seeing the great positive response from the HEN community I decided to keep going and I introduced themes. Now I start by picking a theme and then I build on it. I like to reference stuff from my past like movies, books, toys, etc.
Do you have any creations that stand out to you the most?
At each new pyramid I try to push the technical boundaries in order to learn new things and improve my skills. Learning how to rig and animate a character has been quite challenging but opened up an infinity of new possibilities. Pyramid #6, the most recent one, is the one I am more proud of, but pyramid #2 is the one I am more affectionate to, maybe because it is inspired to my childhood.
Why did you join HEN?
I invested in the Tezos ICO, and I always loved the project for pioneering the Proof of Stake approach and for its on chain governance protocol. With Covid I had to shut down the business I had for the last 7 years and I found myself with tons of free time so I decided to explore the NFTs world. I discovered HEN in its infancy stage at the end of March and I fell in love with the general sense of community that was forming around it. I am very grateful to the opportunities that came from such a simple and raw platform and for the many great people I had the pleasure to meet on the way. I have made some good friends and shared some amazing experiences. I am not really happy with how things have evolved in the management of the platform and I felt very sad when the people who invested their time and skills in making HEN a reality were let down. The ideal of building a decentralized community has fallen apart in favor of a dominus who communicate in a very cryptic way and applies censorship on any voice that is not in line with his choices. Today I look at this as what HEN could have been.
What would you say to artists not interested in NFTs?
One day they will realize they missed the opportunity to be part of an epic shift in the art world. Blockchain technology is changing forever many realities such as the music and movie industry, the finance world, the gaming industry and many others. Being around since the early days will allow some to establish a privileged position that will become much harder to achieve going forward. For older generations like mine giving value to digital assets looks silly. I believe it will gradually become part of the mainstream culture and in the near future, the days where material assets were so important will be perceived as outdated. Digital tokenized art has an immense number of advantages over traditional art such as accountability, transparency, liquidity, no costs for storage or transportation etc. Bored apes are becoming the new Rolex. Not that I personally like any of the two but it sounded like a good example.
What adds value to your art?
I think the fact that I did not stop as soon as I found something that was working from a market perspective and I kept exploring and pushing the limits of what I can achieve. I feel some artists are being trapped in their own success recycling the same idea over and over because they know the outcome is predictable and economically rewarding. This way they do not take risks and they do not grow as artists.
What do you have planned coming up in the future?
More pyramids 🙂
Anybody you want to shoutout?
There are tons of amazing artists in the space. Personally, I think @Thisisarobot2 is incredibly talented and his use of VR to sculpt in 3D is very innovative and will inspire a whole new generation of 3D artists.
Other artists I follow with great pleasure are the Cornet brothers ( @guillustration and @111iks_ ) their work is insane, an explosion of colors with a mental addiction to details.
Anything else?
Make art, spread love and support artists from developing countries. For them even a small sale can be a life-changing event.
I’m grateful for your interest in my work and I wish all the best to GatherArt!