Early Years

As a young boy I was only good at one thing, drawing pictures. My mother said my earliest drawings were made at the age of three. I tried to do other things like sports, but I was a small and dorky kid, always coming in last in the race. School was a mix of life experiences, half good, half bad. If it were not for the art classes in high school, I can only imagine the outcome. Being a troubled kid who graduated near the bottom of my class was, my art teacher saved my ass. She gave me a scholarship to go to art school and advised me to get the hell out of town, since she believed I would do well.

Art college was a repeat of high school, both good and bad. Even though I drew all the time, I still flunked out once and got kicked out a second time. As a young man the only thing that ever made me happy was drawing and making art, and nothing else seemed to matter.

Making a living

For the next two years, I worked twelve different jobs. I even once worked for payments in beer. But there was an event during those two years that affected me deeply. My girlfriend and I went to see an art exhibit by Peter Paul Rubens at the Toledo Museum of art. Being from a small town and never seeing art like this, it shook me to the core. I left the experience exhausted, amazed that a human being could create something so beautiful. At that moment I knew exactly what to do the rest of my life, and that is to paint.

Almost immediately I landed a job as a billboard illustrator, hand painting large scale advertisements onto huge structural surfaces for a road crew to later hang outside. This was not painting like the masters I saw at the museum, but it felt like I was on my way. I was an art school dropout, but working as an artist. I enjoyed the period of illustrating large pictures, but like with many other things, innovative technologies put us painters out of business. So, I packed up my shit and went to the big city to try my luck.

After a year of suffering and falling on my face, an opportunity came along. I suddenly had the chance to work in a studio with a famous and successful artist. His studio paid me to paint commercial projects for retail art galleries. I felt like I had achieved another milestone.

Being from a poor family and not finishing college, I had not believed someone could make a living from just making pictures. Starting back in the billboard years I had opened a studio. I painted everything from Sci-fi to abstractions to realism, and slowly my work was getting traction.

But then 2008 happened, and like many other people, I lost my job. Almost immediately after that I lost my studio as a result of a building structural problem, that killed a friend of mine. To add icing on the cake, the apartment I rented raised my rent so much that my wife and I had to move out of the neighborhood. I could not grasp what was happening. I worked hard and saved my money, but everything was still falling apart.

Being from a poor family can inspire a person to save their hard-earned money. But that is not good enough when things keep getting more expensive. During that time, I did not know anything about Bitcoin, and even if I did, I would have not known what to do with it. Money was not a discussion a single parent had time for. Slowly but surely, we got through the crisis. I had lost two years of income, but found another apartment in a worse neighborhood, at a higher price. I reopened another studio,half the size, for the same cost as my previous workspace, and life went on.

After experiencing those hardships I decided to take the plunge and no longer work for a company that could lay me off. So I became an independent artist, established my studio as a business, and offered my skills and services to folks needing it. During this period, my wife told me that I needed to study what money is. My first reply to her was: “I am an artist, I do not need to understand money”.

I was wrong.

Who am I to argue with my wife? Of course I started to study what money is. I made a promise that if anything ever happened to us like in 2008, I wanted to be prepared. So I learned everything I could. I studied books and listened to podcasts on the topics of money, investing, and trading. And then it happened again!

The rabbit hole opens

Since 2017 I had been accumulating bitcoin while learning what money is, but even then, bitcoin was just another asset for me to own. I did not understand its significance. I only read little about it, and most people in my circles thought it was a scam. And if anyone owned it, most sold right after the all-time highs back in 2017.

March of 2020 was a breaking point. New York City completely locked down, and all my clients closed their doors. My public art project got canceled, and my wife laid off. The stock market crash was a revelation, even though I was not a trader. Studying money had taught me how to identify and protect against what governments are willing to do. Politicians played games with peoples’s lives, destroyed thousands of small businesses, while at the same time printing endless amounts of fiat garbage.

I could not paint for months, but I bought more bitcoin.

“I will not sell my bitcoin”, my wife said in early 2021. I was trying to figure out how to make fiat out of desperation, and I had bought Bitcoin just to try to make money. And on a dime my wife knew something I did not understand.

So, I went down the rabbit hole.

As an artist who enjoyed poking fun of the art world, and being an outsider in New York City who never really became mainstream, my rabbit hole moment came suddenly. As Michael Saylor says, no one who studies Bitcoin for a hundred hours ever goes back. My light bulb moment was reading the chapter on art in The Bitcoin Standard, and listening to Saifedean Ammous talking to Fractal Encrypt about his works.

A bitcoin artist is born

Discovering great bitcoin art, like Fractal Encrypt’s, was a shock to my system, just like the day at Toledo Museum of art. I could not understand how humans could create something so beautiful, and it reminded me of Rubens. From then on, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I had not known there was an alternative to the fiat art world, and that there are artists making art for its community. It seems like years ago at this point, but my first Bitcoin project was only a brief time ago, on April 12, 2021, to be exact. I dove in all the way, and went to my first Bitcoin conference in Miami 2021, again shocked to see an artist in a gallery showing his works and selling it for bitcoin.

This new art is a fresh concept for me, and its exploration has taken me down the rabbit hole. Bitcoin art attempts to express a multitude of cultural and social memes, seen all over the interwebs. At first, I did not understand this phenomenon, how memes are important to this strongly outspoken community. I learned that if you are not inside the world of bitcoin, it is very difficult to get a grasp on the complexity surrounding the community and its development. Slowly, as I got past the bitcoin learning curve, I started to recognize that there is game theory in practice here. A strategy of evolution played out by millions of people globally. It opened my eyes, and I fell down the rabbit hole even further.

This is the point when my fiat friends start thinking I have lost my mind.

I spend all my time studying why and how bitcoin can change everything, and why artists should support this innovative technology. The fiat system is in retreat, and people willing to learn can see it for themselves. The system we are living in is not a fair system. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, only to be knocked down again continuously.

There is a renaissance happening, like the one I experienced that day in the museum looking at Rubens paintings. I wish to contribute my history and skills as an artist, and muster enough energy to help spark this movement. I have learned that bitcoin is an amazing technology, and we can use it to escape from the broken system of a centralized world. Bitcoin can save our energy from depreciation. If that is not a renaissance, I do not know what is.

Today Bitcoin is the focus of my work, painting and drawing individual experiences using MEMES, then reimagining them into our FAKE existence.

So, let's shoot to the moon!