The Wolf Of All Streets - The Artist’s Way Into Crypto & NFTs | Robyn Ward, Contemporary Irish Artist

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

Robyn Ward is a renowned artist who lives between New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City. I caught up with Robyn in New York, in the House of Muse, where he painted his new masterpiece that he would then fractionalize and sell as NFTs. We talked about why an artist would choose crypto and NFTs, what inspires Robyn and why he prefers to paint instead of moving into the digital world. Check this interview and then go check Robyn’s art. Robyn Ward: https://www.robynwardart.com/ ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #nfts Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:02 The artist's way to crypto 5:00 Finding inspiration 8:25 Fractionalizing the painting 11:00 Opportunities in crypto The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

One of the most exciting things in crypto now, I think, is the bridge between digital and physical, right? You're a painter, you're an artist, you're just starting to get into NFTs. Can you talk about how, I guess, you started and how you first heard about NFTs and why it's interesting? So for me, I'll be honest, you know, if you go back to January last year, I didn't even have a crypto wallet, you know,

so I didn't have anything at all. And two collectors, I was in my studio in Bali at the time, and two collectors came into my studio and started looking at a few pieces you know they came back the next week and i said can we buy this thing in bitcoin i said honestly i don't care how you buy it if you show me how to get a wallet to accept it i don't mind you know so they they they set the wallet up for me and then they bought the first that's my book they bought the first pieces off me in in crypto um and then if you know a lot of people people for the last year and a half have then been pitching me NFTs,

do this NFT project, do this NFT project. And this was something which I wanted to touch on, but none of the products have been kind of, I don't really fully understood the NFT world, so I didn't want to jump into something that I don't know. And then whenever Lucas, who set up the House of Muse, came to me with this idea, he's a collector of mine

in the real world. So he's someone who I trust. And he pitched me the idea of bridging this gap between all of a sudden how NFTs sit also in the real world and the gap between the two. And I really like the concept, you know, and the concept that we're doing is it's a real world piece, which is three meters by six meters, which has been dropped into, you know, a thousand, fractured into a thousand different NFTs. And that is, you know, you buy one of a thousand NFTs and this then sits in the real world in a sort of an institutional museum that's going to, that's been donated to after this residency finishes. So yeah, so it's, the project's interesting in that sense he told me that uh

the canvases were so big that you had to literally take a window out of the building not open a window remove an entire window just to get the canvases inside which means you'll have to do it on the way out too yeah well the thing is i mean there's um look i turned up to paint and i said look i need a studio and and somewhere to paint obviously when i turned up me saying that from an artistic point of view, I know what I need. I get here, I'm like, Lucas, we need scaffolding, we need some poor Lucas at the end,

run around the city trying to get me everything you need for a proper artist studio for this month of the residency. And also, the canvas has arrived, I'm like, but dude, how are you going to get them in the building? Where's the crane? And he's like, fuck. So yeah, so the poor guy came up with a lot of challenges to create a studio within the space that he was doing.

But yeah, we had to pop the windows out and we actually brought them up the front of this building and across the side of the other building and over the roof, background and through. And then the same thing's gonna happen on the way back down, yeah. So a lot of what you've been doing has been painting for a live audience, effectively, right?

You're in this space and people show up and they wanna see you paint, but that's not really how the creative process works. So yeah, and also I don't paint in front of people. So for me, I'd be painting in the mornings and I'd paint at nights in here, which has created a massive issue for me because sometimes I wanna paint in the afternoon.

And if I walk in here in the afternoon, there's 10 people here, I'm not gonna paint paint so all of a sudden there was and you know when you get your creativity and you want to paint you want to paint and you know you can't just kick everyone out of space well I start painting so it was it was a lot of a lot of confliction of fighting with myself at nighttime when I came in I wanted to paint and maybe wasn't the mood or in the morning when I want to paint wasn't moved so I was kind of restricted in my hours that I could actually paint because of the people being in here during the day.

And the issue is, if you're in the mood to paint, you don't paint. You know, that's the way it is. And it's, you know, especially when I'm doing large-scale abstract work, it's my, I paint a lot of my own emotions and feelings and anxieties, ups and downs, and I go into a certain zone zone and I can't have people around during that period because I want to really go quite deep in myself and get into a locked place you know. Yeah so what's been the inspiration largely I know it changes but how do you find inspiration for your work on a weekly, daily, monthly, yearly basis? I think for me look I've

moved my shoes all around the world I think I've had studios in 18 different cities across the world. And, you know, I always say to people, you know, it's not a real pain setting up new studios in new cities and new countries and never being to a different language and you don't know anyone. And I always say, yeah, it is a massive pain. It's a pain in terms of cost of setting it all up, buying new studio equipment, etc. And also, you know, in terms of the struggle of finding, like, where you've got to go, the best place to be, where you want to put your studio,

the art stores, the suppliers, et cetera. But at the end of that two years, you can't put a price on the inspiration you get from working in a new environment. Subliminally, every time you walk into your studio, the smells, the sounds, the sights that you see are interpreted into you subliminally and you're putting that then into your palette your canvases and they're changing the way you're painting and for me that's priceless

and it's part of your development as an artist is you're developing you as a person you know right we're standing in front of one of your paintings obviously now which is part of a series that you've been working on and you mentioned to me that it has a lot to do with your childhood yeah so this series was actually all around my own upbringing in Northern Ireland, in Belfast during the Troubles. So it's kind of, it captured, a lot of my paintings have chaos in them. Cause that's, you know, it's a lot of capturing screenshots

and sort of snapshots of my life. And, you know, I have up to 180, 160, 180, 190 layers in some of my paintings. And every layer is kind of a different moment in time throughout my own childhood, right up to the present. But this series in particular was bringing a lot of my paintings and every layer is kind of a different moment in time throughout my own childhood right up to the present but this series in particular was bringing a lot of my childhood memories and that's why you'll see a lot of reference to the troubles that were going on the civil war that we had um so you'll see the police the riots spawns etc within these paintings in a subtle world subtle way and you were you were, I believe, crossing back and forth

across the border when you were a child, right? One parent in Ireland, one parent in Northern Ireland. Yeah, funny enough. So actually I was born in Dublin, but I grew up in Belfast, in the very British part of Belfast. But my father lived in Dublin where I was born. So I kind of grew up very much across both.

And it's one of those things I think a lot of people don't realize, that it did very much tear a country in half. And that's a very small country to start with. It's a million people. I think it's around a million people now. But the religious divide made that 500,000 people. It really was segregated.

People don't realize the segregation that was going on whenever we grew up there. You know, the schools, if you went to school on one side of the religion, you only associate with schools on the other, on that side of the religion. You grew up in that area, you know. And so the segregation was very real.

Do you think that that's part of the reason you became an artist in the first place? Yeah, so I actually, I was kicked out of school when I was 14 or 15, I think. And I remember everyone else was kind of, everyone else was going to school, clearly. And I wasn't.

And I used to take myself off to an old derelict building. And I would just paint a piece up on the wall. And then I would spend a few weeks painting that when everyone else was at school and had nothing to do. And then I'd paint it white again. I just didn't know how to throw up. Paint it white and I'd throw up and that's kind of what I did for the first sort of nine months I was out of school until I went back into a new school

and I think that you know I was always before that I was always drawing and painting etc but that's when I really started getting into my painting on a much larger scale and the piece that you're fractionalizing into NFTs is massive yeah it's three meters by six meters.

For people, I mean, the scale should not be understated. So when somebody goes, I saw there's a QR code next to it, right? You go do the QR code. What happens? What do they get? How does it actually work in the end? Yeah, so the thing is, so basically it's people have been buying the piece up as it's being getting painted. And part of the interesting thing I liked about the concept was we have it laid out online like a chess board you know abc down one side and then

one two three on the top so you basically go down you're like i'll take c12 and i think it was 1.1 eth so this is the right this one i'm not very clear in that few worlds but yeah so there's 1.1 east so the price has been dropping or going up depending on what goes on in crypto um but yes you buy that piece and your nft that you buy right now might look blue and green and yellow by the time i finish it'll be black so you know that was a quite interesting thing about you're buying something which is evolving constantly and um so yeah so it's it's once the piece is revealed completely then obviously you know what what what you're going to get in your nft but until that final reveal stages you you're not actually 100 sure what you're going to get in your NFT, but until that final reveal stage is, you're not actually 100% sure what you're going to get in that space.

And a lot of it's white. There's a lot of white. There's also a lot of negative canvas. Funny enough, the big bit of white came, I think, two days ago. There was a lot of color on it before that. And then it went white. And some people said to me, like, well, if you're going to go white, why don't you just paint it white at the start that's not bad that you go with the emotions and the feelings and the flow you know it's it there may be a bunch of colors underneath here but that's that's

how it is you know and that's why I always say when you come to one of my studios I have maybe it's a workshop you know there's 40 50 pieces of work around and until something goes in the wall you know you can come in the next day and it can be completely different you know it's like that's it until i until i finish a piece it can change it can change massively that's really interesting for a buyer who loved a square and then it changes to buy multiple squares yeah and that's what i quite liked about it i thought it was you know that's why i say you know i you know as i said you know luke is the founder of house of me or my my house of Muse.

He's a collector of mine in the real world, and someone I trust. But that's why I liked it. What's quite interesting about the project was that I like the fact that people are buying something which is evolving, which is changing. And I also like the fact that you're going to have an NFT in your wallet, and then you're going to go to a museum, and you're going to have a section of the NFT in the real world in the museum. And that's something which I found very interesting from the NFT world, because it's basically saying, where does digital and real world meet the museum. And that's something which I found very interesting from the NFT world, because it's basically saying where's digital and real world meets?

And I liked that concept. So now that you've dipped your toes in it, has it gotten your wheels turning as to the other possibilities? It's pretty endless when it really starts, the utility of NFTs is. Well, yeah, I was talking to someone, I had one collector came through the building,

he was a crypto guy, and they were talking about taking my paintings and making them into metaverse worlds and building apartments and houses and selling them off within this wrong world painting metaverse and all of a sudden this part of the painting becomes an oceanfront and yeah it's kind of it's a bit out there for me but yeah i get it you know it's um it's interesting and and i think being here amongst sort of the crypto space and speaking to all the people in the crypto world it's kind of opened my eyes more to kind of it's a lot more than just the cryptocurrencies you know there's

a lot going on do you think you'll always have a physical component to anything that you might do or do you foresee yourself potentially doing one-of-one nfts that are strictly digital i like painting you know i'm a painter that's what i like doing i like getting my hands dirty i like taking out tools i like getting messy um i i don't know that's ever going to change you know i'm uh yeah i like painting you know i have no problem with painting and then taking a digital picture and maybe making that a one-on-one n, that's not a problem at all. But in the first place, I want to paint. That's good, because then you're authentic and true to yourself. I think a lot of the problems actually in the NFT space come, or people perceive them as like cash grabs and things,

when people try to do something that's not their true passion. For me, I paint because I enjoy painting. My inspiration is painting. If we want to digitalize that painting afterwards, that's completely fine. But for me, the first bit is, yeah, I could go on Photoshop and I could knock something up into an NFT very easily, you know, but it's not what I want to do. I'm not a digital artist, you know, I'm a painter. That's what I like to do. I like to paint.

I really like getting my hands dirty. I like my tools. I like to get my time in the studio, my music on. I zone out. It's a therapy for me, you know. And that's why my canvases are in my emotional states throughout the time period I'm painting them. And that's a big process getting in there, you know. One of the popular things for painters that I know, I'm friends with a painter named Trevor Jones,

who just like you is really a painter, but kind of entered into the NFT space, is that you have this one-of-one, it's a painting painting but then you add some movement or something to it yeah so I played around with a bit of that and um yeah it's actually it was quite interesting especially with some of my more figurative work because I had some of the figures were slightly just moving a little bit um actually the piece over in the corner uh which is called lost the bow tie I love it I had the bow tie um slightly changing colors in the digital world so i painted it out took a picture of it and then i said the animation where the bow tie just changed colors very subtly so you wouldn't even notice until you really look at it you know so i did i did like the

idea i saw another nft actually which was very beautiful was a sculpture which is rotating and as it rotates there's a window behind it and you see it going the window going through the four seasons of the year so that's very beautiful? Yeah. So there really are applications where you can sort of amplify your own art while still being true to it. Yeah. Look, I don't know any painter in the world that doesn't know how to use Photoshop. You know, it's weird. We mock up stuff all the time when we're playing around with things

and look at stuff, you know? But for me, it's just I like to get messy. I like to paint. You know, that's what I like doing. You know, um i'm a painter man it's like yeah it's like i get my tools out i get my sprays out i get my paints out and yeah it's uh i create chaos and destruction when i'm painting as part of my process and i i i build layers up to remove layers back down to take them off again to bring out the white spirits and really like scrape it off and get it back down the roots and then bring it back up again and you know build those layers well man

i'm gonna go take a full tour of everything that you've painted and hung in this place and go shopping i can't wait to see thanks so much what else you create man appreciate it yeah thank you so much thanks man Let's go.