Finding Balance
I am not writing any resolutions this year, but I am assessing, assessing where I am and where I want to go. In January, 2021, wanting to expand my presence and sales beyond my northeast Texas locale, I began looking at selling my work online. Somewhere along that path, I stumbled onto crypto, NFTs, and generative art, taking what I now consider to be bit of a detour.
A few definitions might be in order. NFTs are a kind of cryptocurrency object that, though they had existed for years, exploded onto the art scene in 2021. You may have heard about the Beeple piece that sold for $69 million in March of that year. Until just a few months before, Beeple had been selling prints for $100 each. His astronomical rise set imaginations on fire and digital artists began to see a lucrative outlet for their work based on the crypto/blockchain promise of authenticated ownership, direct connections with collectors, and royalties on resale. I caught some of that fever, and having come from a technical background, I dove right in. In particular, I dove into generative art - the art of creating an algorithm that takes a random seed and produces an artwork that, while living within the confines of the algorithm, is first seen by both artist and collector at the moment of collection. I remained immersed in that world until September, 2023, when an unexpected and fortuitous set of circumstances led to the launch of the Windom Art School.
Quadrangle of My Being, one of my NFT projects.
Why do I think of that NFT period as a detour? First of all, I had spent my professional career in front of a computer. I had no intention of spending my retirement there, and yet there I was, sitting for hours a day in front of my computer. Secondly, by the fall of 2023, the luster of the NFT world had faded considerably. It had turned out to be as scammy, opaque, unreliable, and patriarchal as any traditional New York art scene had ever dreamed of being, and I felt off my path, out in the weeds.
The detour served an important purpose, though, and that is why I’m talking about it. Building the algorithms for generative art led me to spend more time considering the conceptual basis of my work. With physical art, I tend to work intuitively and I value that, believing in the deep truth that comes from our core. Writing an artist statement was an exercise of dread - I hated most “art speak” as generally so much b.s., and yet I understood that collectors needed to care in order to buy and that caring comes from understanding. Building an algorithm is the opposite of working intuitively. The code, by definition, has to be built upon some chosen framework. Building and describing my chosen frameworks over a period of months strengthened a muscle that desparately needed attention.
As I became immersed in the NFT community, I realized something else. As much as I value the far flung global community modern technology makes possible, my local community is by far more precious. I needed interaction with other human beings in real time.
In the end, the detour helped me to understand who I truly am as an artist. I want to live in my body, with materials in my hands, embracing physical processes that delight all my senses, and interacting with my local community. I can be a math and logic girl who lives in her head, but I am a materials and process girl, earthbound and in love with the sensory feast. The Windom Art School has brought me back to my center, restored my balance. As I sit here on the cusp of a new year, I am truly grateful for that unexpected gift. How it came about is a story for another day. In the meantime, here is a little something from May of 2020 that comes from the heart.
Text and video by Wanda Oliver, all rights reserved.
