Who’s mercpin?

Excited to announce that our upcoming exhibition “SuperRare GenZs” will open on this Friday (Oct 30) 4-6pm EST.

Featured artists: blacksneakers, etiene crauss, Fakito, Fede Bona, femzor, fewocious, harvmcm, jonathanwwolfe, KaySha, MERCPIN, mushbuh, parrott_ism

Time: Oct 30, 4-6pm EST

Location: Decentraland SuperRare Museum (55,94)

Register: https://events.decentraland.org/en/?event=c083d94f-7e4c-4506-847d-3858022de819

mercpin – 18 year old artist, creating things on the internet

I think the most defining thing about myself and what I’ve observed working alongside other genz artists is the constant change of our times. I just turned 18 and it just feels like the past year or two I haven’t really been able to catch my breath. Everything moves so quickly growing up with the internet. Unlimited information at my fingertips has really enabled me to quickly learn about the art world and develop my work. I don’t think any other generation really had what we have today. So many opportunities , so many people to get to know, gather inspiration from and connect with, all because of the internet and i think that is extremely special. 

I think it relates to my work in the way that I am constantly being stimulated. I don’t have to go to an art gallery to see new work for inspiration , I just refresh my twitter feed. Artists today are more connected than ever in my opinion, we’re able to help each other, share techniques , collaborate and just support each other from anywhere in the world. The brain is a sponge subconsciously absorbing media and transforming it into your own personal, original ideas. The brain has always done that. I just think it’s at a much more rapid pace in our generation’s case thanks to social media and the internet and it has definitely impacted my work.

In my experience sharing my work on social media, the most special thing i’ve observed has been the way people share their feeling about art. People tell me that my work helps them process their emotions in a healthy way and feel understood. My art helps me cope and to see that it has the same impact on the people that view my art is something I find so special. I speak from myself but i think other artist can relate to this as well. My role as an artist today is to process the world around me and the emotions i feel in an original, expressive way to make something that i and people around the world can view and maybe feel something from.

Art means the world to me, it sounds so cheesy but art really saved me. It gave me a purpose, a reason to get out of bed and build confidence in myself as a person. The art community has given me many friends and a place where I belong. I would be dead without art. I became an artist to cope with the world and it has worked wonderfully.

To be honest I don’t know what my goals are as of now. I’m so young and I’m pretty inexperienced in many parts of life, all i could hope for regarding the kind of artist i want to be and for what i hope to achieve is that i stay true to myself and continue to make art that expresses exactly who i am for the rest of my life.

Its crazy to think about where i am right now, i started my art journey a little over a year ago. Then i was very depressed, struggling with an eating disorder and just extremely hopeless in general. I had no direction in life and i used art to cope. I would draw all of the time about how i felt, things i wished to feel, creating a world of color that only i could see in my sketchbooks. Then It was like a light switch flipped, one day i just decided that i was going to try and make something of myself and i just posted a painting on twitter, claiming the name “MERCPIN”. It felt silly and i struggled a lot in the beginning, but slowly I’ve grown artistically along with my will to be alive and pursue art. Now as of today i feel happy, Content with where i am in life and that’s all i could ever ask for in life.

Gustav klint and Yayoi kusama, both of them have heavily influenced my work. Klints mix of figure and colorful abstraction touched me deeply, I love mixing the human figure with bright colors and I really think my style took off after viewing his work. As for yayoi , her early “net” paintings inspired me to twist her concept of using small circles to create paintings so large they become almost environmental in nature consisting of just small circles and a solid wash of background color. I made it my own by filling the circles in my paintings with many different colors bordering on pointillism.

I would say the most important thing is being consistent, consistent in your style, your work ethic, and just overall the quality of what you put out. Staying true to what makes you feel joy in your work and not just painting what you know will get likes on social media.

I paint using almost all the available mediums, i love to experiment. Typically i use a mixture of oil paint, acrylic paint, dry pastels and an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil to do my work.

I think the traditional art world is outdated and tends to operate in an elitist way, cryptoart has welcomed my friends and I in the art community with open arms and has valued our art generously. It’s safe to say that I prefer crypto art and I imagine the future of cryptoart is going to be overflowing with new ways to express and huge opportunities.