NFTs

Campbell Laird

Campbell Laird is a Tasmanian artist currently based in Venice, California. After studying briefly in the New School of Design and School of Visual Arts, Campbell left to invest in his burgeoning illustration career and now creates meditative abstract art that has been well received globally. Campbell’s pieces have appeared in galleries, major corporations, commercial and public spaces, and private collections of modernist homes around the globe. Now his resumé includes NFTs!

Hi Campbell!

Would you like to share some of your art and the process that went into creating them to get us started?

The piece above is called ‘Rain Dream Blue Sea’. It was made in 2021 out of pigmented inks in metallic resin film, acrylic & aluminum and is 30 × 40 × 2 inches:

This artwork is called Hand Drawn Vectors and was created by passing random vector shapes through a large format printer multiple times to create a partially improvised, partially intentional artwork. Each resulting piece is ‘one of a kind’ and can never be repeated. But don’t do it. It will ruin your printer! I got my first wide format printer in the early 80’s. I know them well and how to subvert the process.

This one is called ‘Take it Back’ and consists of an Apple mac g5, os 10.6.7 , 8 gb ram, 5 tb hard drive, adobe CS5 graphics software in plexiglass box submerged with 15 gallons of patron silver tequila, power cord, hammer…

It was a protest about the 2008 Wall Street crash. Suddenly all my projects were cancelled! nearly all in one day!! The hammer was for anyone to break the box and get my computer back! Some people tried!

It was silly really because I really needed the computer, but its in there for good! Its just changing color as the Tequila eats it away!

The pieces you’ve brought deal a lot with spatial perception, whether it’s physically or visually 3 dimensional. How did you adjust your style when working on The Other Avatars?

I was an editorial illustrator in NYC for 15 years for many years. I am used to solving problems.

The ‘drawings’ I created for ‘The Other Avatar Project’ apart from being inspired by the Van Gogh self portraits are also concerned with contemporary ideas around connection and disconnection on the web/social networks. I remember when I saw an iPhone for the first time in 2007. I knew then everything had changed! I wanted to place Van Gogh in this time period.

Also when I saw many of the other Avatar artists were doing more painterly expressive portraits I decided to go in a different direction and use a very basic vector draw software to create images that are precise, objective and have few painterly properties, just line, shape and color. It seemed like a good metaphor for online experience.

Like I am an alien peering down at the human race from afar & sketching what he sees but having no real knowledge of the world he was looking at.. Or am I just drawing myself here? A bit of both maybe.

After having a career in editorial illustration, fine art, and music and working with so many different mediums, what do you have to say about creating NFTs?

Everyone should be doing precisely what they are doing and enjoy themselves while doing it! NFT’s will succeed! They really are a great idea and I like the fact that they have smart contracts.

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