OlgaFradina is a Kiev-based artist and designer whose work I discovered on the Tezos-based marketplace Objkt.com in mid-2022. Since then, I’ve managed to collect quite a few unique pieces, on both Tezos and Ethereum, and as a collector I’m always eager to see what comes next.
Olga’s work is abstract and layered, but carries a unique precision, with muted colors dominating much of the work. The artist was kind enough to answer a few questions for marg.art via email exchange in February of 2023, as the war in Ukraine passed a grim, first anniversary.
First, I know you are in Ukraine — how is the situation where you live, day to day? To what degree has the impact of war had an effect on you, and your work? And is there anything, beside collecting your art, that readers can do to assist or help in any way?
The war completely changed my life. And, paradoxically, not everything is for the worse. I have been involved in art since childhood, I went to different studios. But my main job for the last 20 years has been interior design. This was always not enough for me and at the same time I drew something for myself and was engaged in ceramics. I didn’t make money from it, my customers were my architect friends. The work routine did not allow me to do this anymore. When the war began, almost all projects stopped and I was able to devote myself completely to art. During the first months of the war, this was not possible. But when the troops retreated from Kyiv and it became calmer, I devoted myself completely to my work. A year of war has now passed. And I don’t know if I could have endured it if there was no NFT artistic community. Communication allows me to forget a little about what is happening outside the window. So everyone who likes, supports, buys (my work) helps me in the most complete way.
Odd as that sounds, that is somewhat refreshing to hear, that some semblance of normalcy still occurs. I’d love to know more about your creative routine, if possible. Is there anything special you do to get into a creative mindset?
I work at night — during the day there are many things to do, communication, the dog is very active and wants to play all the time! I like to stay alone and immerse myself in the meditation of work. I can’t have anything to distract me.
Dig.N.26
Can I get some insight as to how you compose these images? For example, a recent piece, Dig.N.26 is one of my favorites. I love the layers and details. Do you use traditional, commercial tools, or do you have any custom tools that you use to create this imagery?
I work with standard commercial tools. 3D work is done in Cinema 4D. When I started doing digital art and NFT, I planned to continue the theme of interiors by transferring it to the digital space. But I was so fascinated by procedural processes and generative art that I completely changed my approach.
I prefer to always be in the role of a student. This gives me a reason not to stop.
I’m currently learning TouchDesigner on my own. And with my old friend we are jointly doing projects in p5.js. He has been my assistant for interior visualizations for many years. He knows programming languages better than me. I study in the process of creating a project and study with a teacher. We jointly look for ideas for the base code, then I deal with variations and the search for artistic solutions. I have always loved research and experimentation. And with generative art, I felt myself in the right place. The same with the Digital Nature collection. I immerse myself completely in the search for aesthetic finds using different tools.
I know you’ve been in the design world for some time. What influences have had an impact on your design work, as well as your art? Can you separate design work from art work, easily?
My design practice is probably still different from my art. In interior design, I use a lot of natural materials – stone, wood, cement, textiles. My interiors are very sensual and tactile. I love handcrafted things, Wabi-Sabi philosophy. In the beginning, I was also fond of many interiors in search of my own style. Now I know exactly what I’m doing.
Likewise with art. I think I’m still in the experimental stage. I sometimes want to do very calm things, sometimes I want an emotional outburst. But I would like my art to feel closer to my interiors. In the latest collections, I explore a lot of textures.
I love a lot of art and the list can be very long. And at different times it changes a little. But if I am asked to quickly name my favorite, I know what to say quickly: Cy Twombly and Pierre Soulages. And everything Axel Vervoordt does — from interiors to his gallery and curation.
Lithograph 2023 #15/50
Congratulations on the success of your two drops on Verse. Both collections were incredible, and sold out quickly. I had to opt to purchase my Lithograph (above) on secondary, but I’m almost glad I missed out on the initial mint, as it shows there is a great market for your art outside of the Tezos ecosystem. I also know you have collections on Foundation and Opensea. Will you be continuing to do multi-chain releases in the future?
I am honored to collaborate with Verse. I think their curation is very high quality. For me, this is the first collaboration with the gallery and I am happy that it went well. I plan to mint more on Ethereum. Now I am preparing a separate collection for this. I like Tezos. When I was choosing which platform to start with, I liked the idea of CleanNFT — but I think we need to develop further.
Texture Pt. 2 #89/100
All of your series have unique names. At what point do you know that you’ve created something new, as opposed to something that may fit into an already existing series?
Everything happens intuitively. I see that another topic has begun. I may have a different mood, experience new emotions. Sometimes after a while I want to go back and add a few works to the collection. I feel that the topic is not yet closed for me. But it always turns out differently after a while. I work with emotions and they are never the same.
SP–04 by 27.000.27
I know you have an AI-based project called 27.000.27. What do you think AI’s role will play going forward in the art world? What tools do you use, and look forward to using for these images? Are they all created from text (prompts), or do you use images to begin them?
I started experimenting with AI in the summer of 2022. But later in Kyiv there were big problems with electricity and for several months I had the Internet for only a few hours per day. I’m using Midjourney, and it’s not realistic without internet. When I had a permanent internet again, I could not tear myself away from AI research for a week.
My interest wanes and rekindles. I see artists who work very individually with AI and make quality art. I do not think that I am now a great specialist in this area — I would like to develop this topic. I want to explore other applications, as well.
I use mostly text inputs without an image. I like to mix my different arts with each other. Sometimes amazing results are obtained. I don’t show much of what I do. I made a second twitter account for this. But in my opinion, I overestimated my capabilities — a lot of social networking is difficult.
When I work with AI, I feel like a bit of an art director. It is difficult for me to predict the role of AI now, but I think it will be significant. I think about it a lot. Everything is moving so fast right now. Looking back just a few years, things were different. I remember when the first social networks started and it was a little entertainment. Now, for many, work is unthinkable without it. Sometimes it seems strange.
F.09 from the Forest collection, in collaboration with Igor Sedov.
What do you think of generative art? I know you’ve released a 1/1 series on Objkt.com called FOREST — are there any plans in the works to do a long-form generative project a la fxhash, and if so, can you give us any further information?
When I started to get interested in NFT, I first saw works of generative art. I immediately felt an interest in it. But I haven’t been programming since the time I studied at the institute and I didn’t remember anything. Before, I didn’t have much passion for programming. But my interest was so great that I started learning programming from the beginning.
Between #66/100
Now I try to study the history of generative art, I read interviews of great masters. I am very interested in developing in this direction and I still have a lot to learn. In fact, I study there a lot now that sometimes it seems to me that my head will burst! At the moment, we have already released the first project (the long form Between on fxhash) and are preparing several more.
One final question: what piece of advice would you give to girls who wish to pursue a life of art and design?
I would advise all people in art to know history well and to be inquisitive and open to new things. I have many friends of creative professions and some of them are stuck in their development and cannot achieve what they want. I analyzed what unites them, and I think that they are not very interested in what is happening around them. And it is very important to believe in yourself and what you are doing. And if you do it with passion, then it will surely bear fruit.
But it is also important not to think that you have already achieved something. I prefer to always be in the role of a student. This gives me a reason not to stop.
My immense thanks to Olga for taking the time to answer these questions. If you’d like to follow the artist on Twitter or other places, here is a Linktree which also contains links to marketplaces currently selling works.
A pseudo-random pick from my collections comes from the artist celadoor, who bills his works as “more of a vibe than a series.” He’s actually a good friend & confidant in the space, and offers a very level-headed approach whenever discussing the latest trends in the Tezos-based art world. In describing his process, he offers this:
I take pictures of moments that never happened and landscapes that don’t exist using a smartphone camera, a light source, and my finger. Most work includes paper currency as a reflective surface.
-Celadoor
A striking image of muted, golden sunlight, with cloud-like formations bleeding into a mountain range below, or, perhaps, more clouds, Atmospherics Twenty-Eight is, as you likely guessed, the 28th item in the artist’s Atmospherics series. Released August 5th, 2021, it was priced extremely (or ridiculously) affordable at just 0.2 Tz (around 0.65 $USD at the time). And yet, incredibly, many of them sat unsold for nearly a full month.
Prolific artists are often misunderstood by the more “serious” art crowd, as those collectorsinvestors prefer limited pieces, sold selectively, the elusive exclusivity of the “Super Rare”. In remaining so prolific and also relatively affordable, celadoor has catered to the true collector here in keeping a healthy supply of easily accessible artworks available through and through. Although, lately, it is getting harder and harder to find a celadoor piece near a 0.2tz price. Remember kids, just because it is affordable now does not mean it’ll stay that way. In the case of Atmospherics Twenty-Eight, all copies sold, but you can still get one — now at about 12 tez.
Follow celadoor on Twitter, find his works on Objkt and (soon) on fx(hash)!
Click image above to see the full-motion splendor of Pure Phase #203Click image above to see the full-motion splendor of Pure Phase #89
Released on December 21st, 2021 on the Tezos-based generative art platform fx(hash)*, Nick Hubben’s Pure Phase is a perfectly simple piece that builds from three overlapping layers, each moving in the same harmonic time, but against each other, creating a design that is eternally out of phase; disharmonious and convergent at the same time. It’s beautiful, it’s brilliant, it’s so simple and a it remains a great example of what generative art can be.
I now own a handful of these (the cost of these at minting was the around 4$USD) but between #203 and #89 I can’t decide on which is my favorite, so I’ve included both here for you to enjoy. There are so many great variations of this piece. As of this writing, thirty or so remain on the secondary market — starting around 8tz (~$17USD).
Nicklaus has not released anything since Pure Phase on the platform, but I can’t wait to see what he comes up with next. Feel free to follow him on Twitter and (fx)hash.
*full disclosure: I’ve been on the fxhash team since the early days.
Tim Maxwell is a NYC-based artist that works with hand drawn lines. Lots and lots of finely-crafted, meticulous, time consuming, hand drawn lines — usually with a trusted fountain pen, on large sheets of paper. It is a very precise, redundant degree of work, but if there is one thing I love about his method it’s just this — the degree of repetition and laser-beam focus on his craft. Out of this monotonous tedium are born incredibly stunning works of art.
Tim is also a solid friend in the NFT art space. I can’t remember when we began corresponding via Twitter, but I do recall the conversation starting around an old photo of Fugazi, and moving on from there. I’ve since collected quite a few of his works. When I though of which of his pieces to showcase here, Tower of Babel jumped out at me. It’s an earlier piece of his, one that he released on the Hic Et Nunc (now Teia) marketplace, in late May of last year.
Tim often works within a few themes, occasionally containing shadowy, humanoid figures scrambling in desolate, endless landscapes. Or at gates, waiting patiently. Or climbing impossibly large staircases. He factors our vain existence as a whole here, as these figures try to climb impossible heights, and fail. Here, a tiny detail from the downloaded IPFS file:
Everyone scrambling like mad.
The piece reminds me of Orson Welles’ interpretation of The Trial, in it’s starkly contrasted, black-and-white beauty — not to mention a few themes evident in Kafka’s original: anti-individuality vs. conformed society, alienation, control, collective consciousness and humanity’s eternal struggle against it.
I am greatly looking forward to meeting Tim at NFTNYC, coming up later this month, where I hope we can chat about more than just art! Besides the work on Tezos, Tim has also released work on Nifty Gateway and Foundation, among many other places. Feel free to check out his releases and follow him on Twitter.
Doom and gloom cycles perpetuate the crypto world seemingly every few months, starting with an obvious affect on a single protocol (or coin) before inevitably taking down an entire market like a perfect game of dominoes. In the world of May of 2022, this shift was due to a person or persons taking advantage of instruments to manipulate markets and take down a particular stablecoin. Before this event, the evil harbinger was interest rates, and before that it was the Poly hack, Ronin, Bitconnect, Kucoin, Mt. Gox, and so on. These hacks are a self-replicating monster lurking under the bed, waiting for everyone to get complacent before unleashing themselves every once in a while, depleting everyone’s investments, and making Matt Damon look like even more of an asshole than he already is.
The NFT market isn’t given any immunity at all. When the price of crypto falls, so do NFT markets. Yet some artists on Tezos have embraced this, and are creating works that showcase a heightened sense of uncertainty. The recent #fear4tez event brought together over 100 artists to release limited works that revolve around the theme of fear. On this page are some of my favorites, with links to purchase. Many of these cost only around 1 Tz, or the current equivalent of about $1.78, an incredible bargain in today’s dreadful markets.
The greatest piece of advice my mother ever gave to me was a truth that life is unfair. It doesn’t matter how much love you may give, or how much joy you may share — our world is inevitably, and naturally unfair to us all.
With this in mind, we must always remember to enjoy each day for the little joys it brings, from the morning laughter of a newly-awakened child, to seeing a dog manically run laps in the backyard. Concentrate less on what makes life unfair, live in the moment and focus on what brings you enjoyment.
It’s also always important to enjoy art, collect what you love (and can afford), and support artists even in down times. Especially in down times! Tomorrow, next month, or next year will certainly bring another downturn, but artists will continue to make incredible work, regardless, and that is a big gain in my book.
NFTs are a serious business. Often, way too serious. Most NFTs lack any sense of humor at all, which is a shame, because I consider humor to be one of the greatest of all human art forms. Why is it so hard to find any humor in the NFT space? Perhaps it is due to the fact that NFTs are inherently just basically code and, well, you know how unfunny code can be.
Jonathan Wolfe is a Canadian-based artist who has been issuing NFTs for a few years now, on assorted platforms and marketplaces. He’s a good friend of Fewocious, with whom Mr. Wolfe has co-hosted a podcast/YouTube channel called Art Art Art, and released a collaborative collection with on Nifty Gateway. I was introduced to Mr. Wolfe’s work via the dontbuymeme site in 2020, and found much of his low-minted work was still available on the Rarible marketplace, for relatively cheap. I purchased this piece for the equivalent of around $70 two years ago. He continues to sell his works through SuperRare, and other places. Below is another favorite piece of his that I own, Bad Day Getting Worse (31/50). I forget where I got it from, but it’s perfect. See here:
How bad can one day get?
But back to Biking Cat — it’s an image of a cat, riding a bike, at night. It’s comedic, amazing and so oddball, off-the-wall, crazy-funny that I couldn’t help but smile and immediately check my ETH balance once I saw it. The anthropomorphized creature looks every bit as surprised to be riding a bike as the viewer would be at seeing a cat riding a bike. How could you not love this? I’m very grateful to have this in my collection, and I hope that it will bring much as much joy to my daughter in a few years.
2021 was an absolutely incredible year for your mother and I. We sold, then bought a house, moved over the span of just a few days, then you came rocking into our little world. We’re lucky for a lot of things, but mostly for the joy you bring into our hearts every morning with that first smile.
2021 was also notable as the year of the PFP (profile pic) dominating the crypto and NFT space. Every single day brought another bozo influencer team claiming that their particular icon would completely change the space and offer utility like no other and 1000x overnight, etc. etc. etc … and some of them honestly did! I missed out on a few that were incredibly successful. But for every Ape, Cool Cat or Penguin, there are tens of thousands more that will ultimately go nowhere.
Many of these are built on the ideals of community and organic growth, and some, such as Kenny Shachter’s CryptoMutts, move beyond this into their own artistic hemisphere and truly become their own thing (a post isforthcoming!) In reality, most PFP projects in 2021 were just looking for a quick way to make their creators as much money as they could, leaving swaths of people scrambling to find the next thing to ape into. And on and on.
Despite my many reservations toward PFP projects, I thought the idea behind World of Women was a good one: celebrating representation, inclusivity, equal opportunities and the power of women. Right on! 10,000 were to be made.
I managed to get a few at launch, and held onto them for about a month, before realizing they were jumping a bit in value. As is typical, I then stupidly sold two and have somehow held onto the above one till now, as she reminds me of the Orions from the original Star Trek TV series, a show we’ll be geeking out over soon enough. I kept her thinking that it was her skin color that made her more rare, but as it turns out, it’s the tux. There are only 100 of them!
Okay, it’s time to head out and pick you up from daycare. We miss you so much during the day.
Love, Pop
P.S. Please don’t get mad if you find out years from now that we sold her. We might have needed it for diapers, daycare or clothes for you, after all.
With the recent crash of all things crypto-related, I thought I’d revisit one of my first purchased NFTs. By May of 2018, the price of most crypto was falling from recent highs, into a lull that would continue for the next full year and a half.
Around then, I discovered Fog Over Gowanus on one of the first NFT marketplaces, the now-defunct RARE Art Labs, an early home to such OG crypto artists as XCOPY, Hackatao and others. I have a background in photography, and really loved the image of the morning fog over the Brooklyn skyline here, highlighting the since-removed Kentile Floors sign in it’s original, industrial splendor.
Although RARE Art Labs is gone, I still own the token to the artwork in my Ethereum wallet. While this token proves provenance, date of purchase and price, it does not link to any known image of the artwork. In 2018, there was no easy way to store items on-chain, and the cloud-based IPFS wasn’t heavily used.
Luckily, I saw the above photograph while scanning a 2018 blog entry in Artnome, Jason Bailey’s fantastic, long-running art blog. I have two other pieces of art from RARE that aren’t so lucky — I haven’t been able to track down any high-res images of them.
But perhaps a solution will be found. Jason has gathered with some friends and started ClubNFT, a service that will eventually allow users to download copies of their NFT collections to their own devices. I greatly look forward to its release! At long last, I will finally be able to store all of the images onto a few tried and true SyQuest drives for all eternity.
Lance Weiler, known online as culturehacker, is an artist/storyteller who works with code to produce glitchy, striking images that often take you to unexpected places. Often working in portrait, his faces and figures are sometimes ghostly, and layered, sometimes striking or bemused. You can occasionally only identify a face by the lips, or nose. He was one of the earliest artists to release work on the Hic et Nunc platform in March of 2021, and remains active in the Tezos community via releases on Objkt.com.
Gemini is fairly typical of his lighter work, capturing a striking gaze in close duplicate, with a marked degree of distortion, melting and glitch. Gemini was a small edition of three. I noticed that another of the editions is owned by Ganbrood, a friend and artist who will appear in this blog soon.
Recently I found out that, like myself, Lance studied film in college, and that he had the opportunity to meet and shoot with the legendary art-film director, Stan Brakhage. This is really wonderful as I can see a bit of Brakhage’s reflections and influence scattered throughout some of Lance’s work. Lance also attempted to release a work a day in 2021, a creative exercise that is very admirable — and also exhausting! And he also recently wrote a nice piece about the demise and rebirth of the HEN community in November of last year. On top of all of this, he’s also the director of the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab.
See more of Lance’s work as culturehacker on Objkt.com. For his amazing series of 1/1 glitch portraits, go here. Follow him on twitter, Instagram or his own website!
Above: a still image from Gas #6/48 by Perry Cooper. Click to view the full, hilarious animation.
Perry Cooper is a British 3D motion graphics designer who now lives in the USA. I found his work in 2020 on Maker’s Place, where he brought an amazing eye to commonplace items like milk cartons, juice containers and even game cartridges.
Above: a still from Condiment Collection / Cheese Sauce. Click image to view full 3D animation.
Milk Monitor Open Editions was a part of Perry’s second Nifty Gateway drop. There were three milk bottles in this time-limited drop: FOMO (Fear of Milk Outage),24/7 and Gas, and Perry describes the collection brilliantly:
This collection is a time capsule for the joy, stresses, anxieties and fun we’ve had over the last few months. I liked the idea of turning a common baby bottle into something rare and valuable, like a Fabergé egg. I’ve also found great pleasure in finding the crossover terms for baby related things and crypto. I’m a dad now, so I can officially do dad jokes!
As a then-expecting father, these pieces spoke to me. What can I say? I had to own one, knowing that at a future date I’d be able to pass this one along to my own daughter (now at three months) and get a big laugh out of it. I finally settled on Gas, as I laughed when I read further. Perry’s description of this piece is amazing in itself, as it goes from the cost of crypto transactions, to farting, to embarrassing your offspring well into the future:
We pay the price for minting our NFTs in Gas, and all of that milk leads to an equal amount of Gas. My daughter used to sound like a trumpet, but that seems to have calmed down now. This is forever on the blockchain right? So I can embarrass my daughter 20 years from now? Hello! This is your dad from the past, you passed gas a lot! You’re welcome.
The piece is hysterical, enjoyable, playful and fun, and I can totally sympathize with the artist, now that I know just how much my own tiny tot can toot like a tugboat. The mildly explosive (and musical) sound design was done by Guilt Free in Soho, London. Perry has a very helpful YouTube channel here, and can be found on Twitter here.
