THE NFT, by Stellabelle. Owned by Metapurse. Link

A Closer Look With Stellabelle

Welcome to part two of this four-part series on NFTs. In case you missed the first segment, we featured MASHINΞ.

If you aren’t paying attention to NFTs, you should be. In just the past few days, the following organizations have jumped headfirst into NFTs: Fox Entertainment, CNN, and the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers.

Do I have your attention now? Good! Let’s cover some basics first.

What are NFTs?

For a deeper dive here is a full explainer on Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. They are an exciting new technology, one of the many innovations brought to us by blockchain.

Definition
Non-fungible: adjective. Not fungible. Meaning not capable of being replaced by another identical item easily; not mutually interchangeable; unique.

This technology embraces many fields: digital art, collectibles, gaming, certifications and personal licenses, domain names, music, fashion, finance and insurance.

But we must give credit where credit is due. The pioneers in NFTs will always be the digital artists.

Join me as I dive into the underground digital art scene and connect with one its leading NFT artists.

Who is Stellabelle?

Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken, by Stellabelle. Owned by persplex. Link

Stellabelle is an OG crypto artist, author, voxel architect and community builder. She founded one of the very first crypto art collectives, Slothicorn, in 2017, which you can learn more about here.

Her cryptoart has been collected by some of the most well-respected art patrons including Bullauge, Metapurse, Lander, Moderats, Robness, Collin and many others. She created some of the most cutting-edge art exhibitions in her Cryptovoxels gallery including: FRIDA, F*ck Wall Street and RAW.

Her upcoming show, WATER will feature her paintings of seven dreams that are submitted by others. The profits from these Dream NFTs, will be split 50/50 with the dreamers. To see the progress of her show click here.

To see her project Slothicorn, listed in the History of Crypto Art under the year 2017, click here.

You can find her art and follow her on Twitter, Linktree, Foundation, Opensea, Makersplace, Cryptovoxels Gallery, Cryptovoxels Wearables, Hicetnunc and pretty much wherever NFTs are found. Also, here is her website and her NFT Showroom.

A Closer Look

I reached out to Stellabelle to get a closer look into her mind and heart, as well as ask about her personal views. Here is what she had to say.

1. How and when did you get into art?

I got into art during college. It all began quite by accident as I began to doodle during math class and I was both shocked and amazed by what emerged out of me organically, without conscious thought. During this time at college, I did my first large-scale drawing when I was ill with some strange ailment in my eye which caused it to turn completely red. The doctor said my eye had dried out, and in my panic, I drew myself with a giant red-colored eye. This marked the beginning of my free-form exploration, drawing some pretty raw themes like sexuality, pain, and other personal stuff. I also began to make experimental films, collage art, discovered video feedback by accident, writing and other creative projects with my best friend Daphne Young. She and I created elaborate mail art, experimental art and videos that, looking back now, are quite bizarre. At the time, I was also studying street photography influenced by Diane Arbus, which became an obsession for a long time. I had several solo art & photo shows in the late 1990’s, one of which ended up being banned because a woman had a seizure while viewing it. It was so weird getting the call from the gallery telling me they had to take down my photographs because of this strange incident.

2. What inspires you to create?

I am inspired by visions. I’ve had very vivid visions for a very long time, and I also have a strong impulse to show these visions to others. I am inspired by pain, love, and very personal confessions. Some of my art emerges out of nightmares, hallucinations and things that I don’t quite understand about myself. I want to tell stories about what I experience, what I fantasize about, and the internal mechanisms of my mind. I want people to feel something in my art. I often use art as an outlet, and like I mentioned, sometimes I am not consciously aware of what emerges, for example, with my piece, Wally Said I Was Dirty, that art just emerged out of me, just in the way that children express things without much conscious thought.

In 2008, I took artistic visions to another level when I lived out a creative fantasy in San Diego, California. I had a strong vision of me becoming the Patron Saint of Postcards and I lived this for several months. The vision appeared to me much like a dream, and I saw myself wearing a hand-made postcard apron, a crown, and a messenger to all people. I made hundreds of one-of-a-kind collage postcards, and gave them away or sold them to people on the street. If someone was really interested in them, I gave them for free, but if someone asked how much they cost, I would sell them. You can see me here wearing my crown and this was during that phase.

3. Which came first for you? Crypto or digital art?

Digital art came first. I discovered crypto in 2016. I spent 7 years as a production artist in a sticker factory. I taught myself how to hand code websites in the early days of the internet and I built an experimental website called Wrongland. In my Wrongland website, I hid things that people had to find by clicking on random objects. When they clicked on them, they would win absurd things like plastic sandwiches in the mail. I made Wrongland as an artistic response to the money-focused dotcom days.

My website was actually trying to do what I am now doing in Cryptovoxels, a metaverse virtual world. I am focused on creating unique experiences for people’s minds. I dreamed of creating unique experiences for people, as I view modern life as a hollow expression of just a few shallow people. The over-focus on sales is what I think degrades humans, and I aim to provide an alternative in the virtual world I’m building. Yes, we all need to earn money to live, but happiness derives from something deeper. Money is a side effect of delivering true value to others.

In my first exhibitions, I created a new approach to the gallery experience. In one of my galleries, I created a Community Art Show, which means that anyone who submitted art would get their art displayed. And in my other gallery, I had a curated show, which reflected the art that I hand picked from just a few artists. My F*ck Wall Street exhibition in Cryptovoxels got a lot of great reactions from the community, but no media picked up my story.

My exhibitions in my Cryptovoxels museum are geared towards smart and perceptive people. My goal is to find and collaborate with like minds. That has been my goal for as long as I can remember. I like the idea of creating artist-led scenes, much like in days of the past.

4. How and when did you get into Crypto? What was the first cryptocurrency you bought?

I got into crypto when I was a science and tech writer for Interesting Engineering in 2016. I was doing research in the middle of the night, looking for sources about a programmer who automated his job, and I stumbled upon Steemit.com. I was super early finding it, as I think I was the 11,000th account to join. At that time, there weren’t even payouts for posts.

Crypto changed my life. I was completely broke and working my ass off as a tech writer, just barely making ends meet. I wrote one article per day (7 per week) for IE which paid me only $500 per month. I also hustled and found a ghost writing gig for a software CEO, which paid me decently.

Once I found Steemit, I began to study everything about blockchain tech that I could get my hands on. I think I didn’t sleep for weeks. I was so completely overwhelmed as I think I was looking for this for my whole life.

Unlike a lot of people, the first crypto I got was all earned on Steem. From there I converted Steem into Bitcoin and began to buy other crypto. My first trade that earned me $50 was Potcoin. I remember buying Ethereum for $11. LOL.

Then in 2017, I created one of the very first crypto art collectives called Slothicorn. This project educated artists about the emerging crypto art scene and also the slothicorn account on Steem paid out crypto to artists on a daily basis through upvotes. I funded this myself. We had a team of curators, a discord and we did art collaborations, and other art projects.

We taught artists about Super Rare, CryptoPunks, Rare Pepe, RareArt.io, and other newly formed NFT projects. We also worked with writers who contributed articles about early NFT pioneers like Sarah Meyohas who created Bitchcoin in 2015 and Coin Artist who is the inventor of the Bitcoin art puzzle genre. My cryptoart community created a supportive environment for artists who were new to crypto. I’m listed in the 2017 section of The History of Crypto Art.

Here’s an article I wrote at that time that explains about Slothicorn.

I created and launched many projects while in Steem: Secret Writer project, Steem Gnome and the YouTube series, Steemicide Hotline.

5. You are widely considered an NFT OG. You have built a gallery with your digital art at a specific address in a virtual world called “Cryptovoxels” which exists on the Ethereum blockchain. Can you explain this to me like I am five years old?

Out of all the art I’ve created and sold, I have to say that THE NFT, which is owned by Metapurse (the same collector who bought the $69 million Beeple), is my favorite. Here’s that art.

It symbolizes this: creative minds make the blockchain technology accessible to all. Without artists, the tech is not able to be understood or popularized.

Having a gallery in Cryptovoxels is like having my own 3D website. In it, I can display my art, and we can interact inside of a digital world that I create. We also can chat and do things like dance, and wear hand-made digital costumes. The truly unique part of this is that the users own the world. It’s managed by a team of devs, but the users are the ones who create the scene, the dreams and the art that is everywhere. User-owned virtual worlds are the future.

I have had 4 art shows so far in my cryptovoxels gallery and they all contained many artworks by other artists besides myself: FRIDA, F*ck Wall Street, The Raw Show, Mothers of Ethereum and I also made my gallery open to all for 2 weeks….I am working on my next show which is a solo show, and contains a lot of my cryptovoxels wearables that anyone can buy and wear inside of CV.

In each one, I created a treasure hunt in which the winner(s) had to solve some mystery. I was influenced heavily by Coin Artist, and so far, I’ve created over 5 different treasure hunts and/or ciphers.

6. What is the biggest challenge artists face today?

The biggest challenge artists face today is: “What to mint?” and “Where to mint?”

7. As an artist, how important is community?

For me, community is everything actually. Although I tend to work on my art alone, I really love to help create an environment that is fun, supportive and not so focused on the sales part. As I have said before, for me, creating mind-blowing experiences for others is where my magic is generated. I want people to say, “Wow, I’ve never experienced anything like this” when they visit one of my shows in Cryptovoxels.

8. What advice would you give to an artist who wants to jump into the world of digital art and NFTs?

Get your Twitter game up to snuff and share constantly. Don’t shill…SHARE.

9. What advice would you give someone who wants to be an NFT collector?

Advice for an NFT collector: buy art that speaks deeply to you.

10. Twenty years from now, where do you see NFTs in the art world and the world as a whole?

In 20 years, NFTs will be the norm, and no one will think twice about it. It will be the internet of value, and in fact the internet needed this technology when it was first born.

Thank you for interviewing me!

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This content is for educational purposes only. It does not constitute trading advice. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do not invest more than you can afford to lose. The author of this article may hold assets mentioned in the piece.

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