Amid a raging pandemic, modern artists are turning toward digital art and making millions. When we initially hear the term crypto art, there’s a tendency to write it off as a novel but ultimately valueless quirk of the internet. In reality, crypto art shares several similarities with the high-stakes business of art auctions. Artists such as Kelsey Grina are bridging the gap between traditional art and crypto art in ways that may lastingly alter the future of creating, purchasing, and selling art.
In traditional auctions, an expert-verified piece of original artwork is sold to the highest bidder. In the field of cryptoart, digital artwork is minted through blockchain-based platforms. The most often used platform is Blockchain.com, which is associated with cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Blockchain is a decentralized database that stores transactions in chronological order in a public ledger. Any user can see the contents of another person’s wallet, thus verifying the sale and ownership of digital assets.
At first, a unique token is attached to the original file and acts as an authenticity certificate. Then, a “block” gets permanently added to the chain of information existing on the platform. Through open data access, art dealers can easily track the growth rate of crypto-artwork. Although it’s an emerging field, perhaps soon, crypto art will surpass the imposing $450 million paid by art dealers for Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi painting.
Crypto art itself has several sub-genres, just as traditional art has movements, such as impressionism and realism. Meme culture heavily influences crypto art, which has several contemporary genres such as CryptoKitties, Rare Pepe, Glitch-art, among others. A meme is a piece of media that is spread rapidly by internet users, and the larger the meme, the more likely it is to gain popularity across several social media platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and TikTok.
The uniqueness of crypto art stems from its ability to encompass every art genre. In this rapidly developing digital art landscape, the traditional is juxtaposed with prominent memes and internet famous styles to create an unprecedented experience. As the pandemic continues, artists of all genres have begun to use crypto art as an alternative route to the often exclusive and complicated process of selling artwork.
Kelsey Grina is a Los Angeles-based visual artist who focuses especially on the female form in her works. She creates layered pieces through the use of several mediums, including oil and acrylic paint, as well as 3D foliage. Through her work, she represents the female body as both feminine and powerful in contrast with the traditionally stifled portrayal of the feminine. Recently, Grina has transitioned into creating crypto art and physical art pieces on Rarible, an Ethereum based digital marketplace for art.
What initially got you started with art?
I am very fortunate to have creative parents. They’re architects, and my grandmother was also a painter and very talented with all different instruments and things, so from an early age, I was drawing and painting and encouraged to do so, and I just kept doing it. I decided in high school and then in college that I was better at doing it than the other subjects. And then I graduated with an art degree… Fine Arts and or visual performing arts… I went on to teach. So I got to experiment with every type of art. And I loved it.
Do you have any muses, as in artists that are currently painting or used to be painting?
It’s a little bit harder to narrow that down, but I would say that one of my favorite painters is J.M.W Turner. He was at the beginning of the romantic period and one of the pioneers; I just love how he captures the emotion of a landscape, and I don’t paint landscapes, so there’s not a lot of overlap, but I would love to bring that same energy towards my pieces.
I noticed that you frequently use bold reds and moody pink and focus on the female form. Why?
So that goes back to my childhood and upbringing. I grew up overseas, and I lived in the Middle East and Kuwait for most of my life. It was just a very different culture and very conservative. I think that my perspective of living there and then coming back here and that difference in what we view is beautiful. I touch on censorship a little bit and what we are allowed to see and what we’re allowed to think is beautiful, and that’s why I keep coming back to the female figure.
I’m in love with Greek mythology and Roman mythology and all of that art too. And that is a lot more female-positive. They love the feminine energy, and I feel like we’ve lost that. I think bringing that back into the picture is important. I love playing or exploring the concept of that. Maybe, but not necessarily the generic that we’re told to perceive.
Women that I paint are in positions and have attitudes representing power or confidence and might not be in the dainty, typical pose that traditional art has had. I like bringing another view into that whole perspective.
In your artwork, do you use oil paints instead of acrylics, and why if so?
So I predominantly use oil, but I work in acrylic, and a lot of my pieces are larger too. I mix a lot of my paints. You can work with acrylic first and then oil, but for my larger pieces, I’ll sometimes use house paint or other bigger cans that I can get because I also do murals, and so I like working large-scale, and basically, it’s a different process. I like oils because it takes a really long time and then I like acrylics because you can work very fast. So I don’t stick to one, just what I feel like at the time.
You usually paint on a large scale, but you are also a crypto-artist, and that’s in the grand scheme of things, small and tiny, so what made you gravitate towards cryptoart?
That’s a good observation. I have a friend that got me into crypto, and it’s funny. I remember seeing him a couple of months ago, and he explained it to me, but it just didn’t click. Now I know that if I had just listened to him, I know that everything he would have said would have made sense. Like yes, it’s the future, but I wasn’t ready to listen to it or understand it. And then I saw him again in early January, and he helped me get set up and helped me understand how I can fit into that world and in that community.
I’ve always strayed away from digital art. I mean, I love Photoshop. I love working in different programs, but I get a little frustrated with how many options there are. I’ll save a million versions instead of like pick one, and that’s why I like painting. You have one painting, and you can either continue with whatever layer or process you’re doing, but you can’t save it. That’s why I never thought I fit in with the digital world, and I now understand that I can take photos of my artwork and integrate that into the whole cryptoart-world. I am really interested in documenting the process because I think that the process is just as important as the final piece. That’s something that I think is unique to cryptoart where you can save moments and tokenize them or share them, and people can own them.
It brings a whole new perspective to just something as simple as painting, and as far as the scale, I think I prefer to have my artwork in the crypto realm rather than sold as prints. And I think that like my paintings… you need to experience them either in person. Yeah, or maybe through a screen, it’s a little bit different. I just feel like a physical paper-like print out of it doesn’t do it justice.
But that also kind of leads to an idea that I’m playing with where I take my paintings, and I divide them into specific sections, and then mint those individually, so it’s still part of a whole. But you know, the whole painting still exists.
You and Jason (YouTube content creator from the channel Thee Hustle House) were talking about the future of cryptoart, and I was wondering if you have any concerns about what consumers will do with the art once they’ve purchased it?
Yeah, so that’s something that I was concerned with when we did that on that live stream. That was like right at the beginning. I was just starting to wrap my head around it, and I’ve done more research since and from what I understand. I mean, it’s still based on an honor system. If I say, I’m only going to mint three versions of a painting. Then that’s on me to not go against that. But in the end, if I do it, that’s up to me and that, I guess, that ruins my credibility as an artist. But as far as people buying it, from what I understand now, it’s not for commercial use like, and that’s something that Jason and I were going back and forth. What happens if you own it? What can you do with it?
And from what I understand, it’s basically for your own personal viewing purposes and enjoyment. However, the artist still has the right to reproduce it and do whatever they want elsewhere. I would say that I can still print physical prints if I want of these images.
Do you have any pressing concerns about the future of cryptoart?
I think for the future, it’s an emerging field. Yeah, as far as concerns, I don’t have too many. I feel like it’s more of an eye-opening opportunity. It allows a lot of people to become collectors that wouldn’t necessarily feel like they could in the real art world because it is a little bit, I don’t want to say prestigious; I just think that there’s a certain way that people have to go about doing things, and even myself as a fine artist making physical artwork, I haven’t really tapped into much of that world. I prefer the crypto art world.
The community is super supportive. Everyone’s really genuine, and they want to see good art be shared. It’s not about taking advantage of the artist and making money off of them. That does bring me to something else that I touched on with Jason: the royalties system. Once you sell a painting, you don’t really get much out of it afterward if it resells for a higher value.
But with everything documented in crypto art, you can see where it originates from on the blockchain, and then how it continues and who owns it, and then how much it resells for, and the artists still get whatever percentage they put on the piece and continue to make money. I think that’s a really, really great idea. Whether it’s for art or music or any other thing that people create, I think it just really benefits the people that are creating.
The real art world seems very unnecessarily exclusive. What are your thoughts on what it is like actually being an artist in the field?
I’ve been skirting around it. I feel like for a couple of years now and just partly because I’ve lived overseas and I’ve been in different environments… I would say that mostly I’ve done a lot of live painting at different types of events, and that’s something that I prefer because you engage with an audience. It’s obviously performative, and so I did events like that in other countries. But I haven’t really tapped into the elite art world, and as much as I want to because I know that that’s the next step, I’m a little intimidated. I’m on the edge. If I did find a gallery that I agree with, then I am all for it.
Yeah, I haven’t done a lot of searching, and I’ve been living here in LA for the past year, right when everything got shut down, so it’s a little difficult, but crypto is helping.
How has the pandemic impacted your art? I say this knowing that you do have a gorgeous artwork labeled quarantine.
Yeah, I mean that one speaks for itself. That’s exactly how I feel about it. As far as how it affected my career and my life… everyone has their ups and downs, and especially when you’re creative, and you know that there’s like an allocated time, you’re like alright… you have to stay at home… this is when you need to create, you face that it’s the pressure of doing your most amazing work and making sure you have something to show for your time spent at home doing nothing.
Then there’s just the stress of the whole world falling apart, so you’re constantly like, is it worth trying to be in a peaceful, positive, creative mindset and then also juggling the weight of the world and everything else.
I picked up another quarantine hobby and turned it into a mini business. I started doing flowers, so that’s my little creative outlet. I’ve definitely tried to use this time to delve deeper into why I paint what I paint, and that’s where I’ve been developing my narrative. I’ve had some help with that, and it makes it easier to talk about and explain now because before I just painted women, I didn’t know why but now I know why.
To an emerging artist who just wants to jump in, what would you say to that person?
It’s funny. I’ve had a couple of people reach out to me directly in the past couple of days, and I feel like I’m just figuring this out, but I definitely have learned a lot, and I would love to share everything that I’ve learned. Many people get a little bit intimidated at first by the different platforms, and I myself am applying to and on the waiting list to some of the more exclusive ones. I understand that it takes a while now because they’re so inundated, maybe up to six months, to get a response.
So I think that the best piece of advice for anyone starting is to apply to those and get your artwork up on the other computer platforms that are more available, like Rarible. You can start to sell by being there and just start showing that you have work and then, on top of that, getting involved in the different communities. I learned how to use Twitter because of cryptoart. I refused for decades now. The community there is great, and they’ve been helping.
You paint in the physical realm and then mint the painting through blockchain, but what happens to the physical painting?
That’s something that I also kind of touched on with Jason as well and is something that, as of right now, I’m just selling the digital. I call them digitized artwork. I still have the physical piece here, and I know it is possible to sell all these actual physical paintings. I know some people do giveaways or get a redemption code or redeemable code, and you can get T-shirts or plug it in on my site and this and that, and then you get the physical thing. So you can still buy it as an NFT pay with Ethereum, and that transaction happens that way.
But then, outside of the blockchain, you exchange the information, and I can mail it off. I’d like to auction off my physical paintings. That’s something I’m going to plan out soon. Actually, I have seen a couple of artists do that, like on SuperRare where they sell two versions, the digitized version, and then I saw the physical one, and I think the artist wanted them to be together as a pair. It’s sort of sentimental.
Is cryptoart accessible?
I’d say fairly accessible since you definitely do need someone to show you the ropes somehow, but it’s do-able. It ties more into just the acceptance of crypto, and like you know, the normalization of it. I recently saw one of the artists I follow on Twitter post their project getting recognized by the New York Times. And they’re like, alright, cryptoart is in the newspaper, it’s in the New York Times, like people are talking about it.
So as far as it being accessible, I think that that just really depends on where people are at first with trusting crypto. Once I accepted it as safe as in: can I put my money on here? Can I not get my information stolen? But once you get over those fears or just become more informed, I would say it’s extremely accessible.
Is cryptoart growing alongside the physical art world and art dealing community, or is cryptoart a separate entity that will overtake the traditional?
Right, I mean, I think that it’s its own being. It’s just the beginning. I think it’s going to take over. In the long-run, it will be more accessible. More people will be able to just jump on and buy art and invest in art, and that will make it more popular than, you know, a stuffy gallery, but I don’t think it will.
I think the other art world will continue to exist in its own realm. But with the pandemic, if everyone is sitting at home and can’t go places, it’s easier to go on your computer and collect art that way or learn about all of these things. It also allows for a lot of interesting collaborations.
I’ve seen some music artists collaborate with other visual artists like they’re doing some really cool stuff. I think there’s like a couple of virtual art galleries. The concept of going into virtual reality and looking at art that way is more accessible right now. It’s going to keep growing, and I think it’s going to take over.
What is it like as an artist to give away or sell your art?
That’s the cool thing about NFT. They’re still there. I still technically have it. They technically have it. Everyone’s happy. With my physical art, it means the most to me when people buy my art because I see something in them that they see in it, like they have to have it and that’s why I create what I create. When people come directly to me and find my artwork and I see their faces, I see their expressions, which means a lot.
In the crypto world, I’ve gotten a lot more out of people like they’ve reached out to me and talked to me about my artwork, which is cool. It just comes back to the community being super positive and supportive, and a lot of it is artists supporting artists, which is cool to have. There’s a couple that have other artists’ work that have bought some of my artwork, and I follow them. Sometimes the audience picks which pieces they like the most. I love having the interaction… that goes back to when I used to teach art. It’s nice having critiques and getting feedback from people that you know and respect.
Do you feel any external pushback, or are you surrounded by people on the new frontier and ready to take what life gives them?
I would say yes to both; I found a supportive group of people that are already involved. When I mention crypto, it’s either like a blank stare, or “Oh yeah,” I just heard about it, and you go off on a conversation about it. But as far as pushback goes, I think it could just be a little bit of skepticism from some older people, maybe my mom a little bit. But once they see how excited I am and how much research I’ve done and how much I put into it and what I’m getting out of it… it’s hard to continue to argue.
See more of Grina’s work:
Instagram: @kelseygrina
Rarible: Kelsey Grina
Twitter: @KelseyGrinaArt
TikTok: Kelsey Grina
Artwork Archive: Kelsey Grina
