SuperRare x Bonhams presents CryptOGs: A conversation with Coldie

By Luke Whyte, Editorial Director

Calling California-based mixed media artist Ryan (Coldie) Colditz’ art “3D” doesn’t really do it justice. Combining source materials from a variety of mediums with stereoscopic techniques and shifting focal points, one seems to fall into Coldie’s work only to be spit back out with more questions than answers, like staring into one of those Magic Eye posters from the ‘90s.

This depth in perspective is matched by a depth in narrative. His work mixes socioeconomic statements with metaphysical metaphors to tell stories about our place in history and in the universe.

We sat down to discuss these visions, his experience in the NFT community and Proof of Work – Genesis, the artwork to be auctioned in the SuperRare x Bonhams collaboration.

Click here to visit the Bonham’s CryptOGs auction page.

An early adopter of NFT art, Matt, like most of the CryptOGs, felt like an outsider before finding the CryptoArt community. Today he is seen as one of its leading pioneers. Over the last week and a half, we spoke via phone and email about his process, his history in space and M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #9, the artwork to be auctioned in the SuperRare x Bonhams collaboration.

Click here to visit the Bonham’s CryptOGs auction page.

The Lost Vitalik – Decentral Eyes Genesis

RC: The very first place I did digital art was at my grandparents house who had one of the first Macintosh box computers. I was about 5 years old and my grandpa would load up ‘Paint’ and I would play around. I vividly remember using the fill tool to make a brick background and drawing on top of it with the marker, doing some type of graffiti. Then I remembered that all I had to do was double click a button and it will all wipe away and I could start over. I had no prior interest in art or creativity like this, but even at that time I could tell it was something that I wanted to investigate further.

I would consider myself starting creating art in 2010 when I moved from Los Angeles became to my hometown to live with my parents. It was a transitional time for me and while I was in LA I had come up with so many ideas, I needed time and space to create and in my parents basement was where that happened. These unique techniques from professors at Cal Poly Pomona allowed me to take my digital art and put it onto a canvas. It was the process and medium together that took my digital ideas into being art on canvas. Those early works I still own and they are a testament to ‘going for it’ and doing the very best with what you have available. 

The Lost Vitalik – Decentral Eyes Genesis

RC: The very first place I did digital art was at my grandparents house who had one of the first Macintosh box computers. I was about 5 years old and my grandpa would load up ‘Paint’ and I would play around. I vividly remember using the fill tool to make a brick background and drawing on top of it with the marker, doing some type of graffiti. Then I remembered that all I had to do was double click a button and it will all wipe away and I could start over. I had no prior interest in art or creativity like this, but even at that time I could tell it was something that I wanted to investigate further.

I would consider myself starting creating art in 2010 when I moved from Los Angeles became to my hometown to live with my parents. It was a transitional time for me and while I was in LA I had come up with so many ideas, I needed time and space to create and in my parents basement was where that happened. These unique techniques from professors at Cal Poly Pomona allowed me to take my digital art and put it onto a canvas. It was the process and medium together that took my digital ideas into being art on canvas. Those early works I still own and they are a testament to ‘going for it’ and doing the very best with what you have available. 

Crucify Fiat

RC: Those LA Weekly years were definitely what shaped and formed my brain early on for creating art in a fast-paced environment, where the wild idea was applauded, but it must be executed correctly the first time due to the nature of the weekly paper publishing. It was also a really fun challenge because I would be given a few small JPEGS by the writer and told to use these for the artwork. Often the artwork was totally not usable and I had to riff off the images to create something totally unique, many times with only a few hours to go from concept to final production art.

As I developed into an art director, these same skills would come into play, but now I was both designing at times as well as giving others direction of what to create. It’s always a give and take with art direction because I want to honor each artist’s vision and talents and its finding how their secret sauce can accentuate an idea in perhaps a different way than I had visualized in my own head. Teamworks has always been my mantra with art and design. When all parts come together and add a unique touch, that is a winning project.

Warren Buffet – Decentral Eyes – Variant 02

RC: Over the last year, it was becoming more and more common for artists in the space to reach out to me, asking how I was able to do a full-time art director job as well as create art. My response was that I didn’t have a choice and I was trying to make both work. For the past 11 years of making fine art, my goal was always to do my best work, and find ways to carve out a little more time to focus on the art and shift the focus from commercial work to my own passion projects. I grinded HARD at all times. Most nights I would work my job, take care of family responsibilities, then around 9PM I would have a little bit of “my time” that I would alway devote to creativity. The problem with this was it was always when I was wiped out and I considered it ‘trash time.’ I was always driving to photograph concerts with my 3D camera. I never got paid a dime for all the time and energy it took to make these projects happen. I create for the pure joy and passion and I only like to make things that interest me. With such a healthy does of ADD, I was always trying to outdo the last project to give myself something new to learn and grow. To me, sweat equity is the best way for anyone to get places they want to if they don’t have money to fund it. The hard work becomes its own currency and fruits of the labor is the art. 

My solution to this dilemma was that during my day, no matter what it was, I was mentally designing the artwork I would do at night. I was literally mentally moving layers around, changing scale, testing collage layouts in my head. I would make so many stylistic decisions or at least boil down to a few optional solutions that when my free time would happen, I was able to very quickly execute the idea that had been percolating in my head and come up quick progress. This points back to my LA Weekly days of efficient use of time and effective art making skills to make my ideas come to fruition most efficiently.

As the crypto art community grew, i was in a creative flow and through that was building my own style and voice, the opportunity to change that balance to fine art became an reality. I would  continue to get the questions asking how I did both the art director job and art, and it became harder to answer. It was a LOT and the strain was taking its toll. I was still giving everything my total effort, but I saw that there was a huge opportunity that if I were to go all-in with art, that the possibilities far outweighed the fulfillment of commercial art and design. I literally held onto both as long as I could but now that I am on my first day of not having the art director job, I have never been more excited to get to work. I have decades of dreams that were never possible. Now, every single one is, and over the last decade my skills to execute those dreams is greater. I truly feel like I have just started a new renaissance period in my own life.

Alan Turing – Decentral Eyes – Variant 01

RC: Now, I consider myself a collector as well as an artist. In my 20s living in Los Angeles, absolutely not. The major distinction is that I never had a means to collect. Both in terms of the monetary as well as the storage space. What I used to do in LA while at LA Weekly was going around to all the galleries and openings in town. I would study every show. The font on the window titles. The reception booklet. The arrangement of the pieces. The amount of people in the room and seeing who was actually there for the art, or for scenester reasons. I would study the fuck out of pieces that caught my eye. Would get up really close to see how the paint sat on the canvas. How the artists dealt with the sides of canvases. I always smiled when I saw an artist would continue the art around the edge. This whole time, I was broke as a joke. I would go around and pretend I was a collector and I would pick my favorites. This practice was not only a cheap way to mentally collect art, but it began to shape my taste about what I appreciated in other people’s art. Many times it would be way different than what I made. I could fall in love with a knitted blanket if it was done in such a way that amazed me. 

Once NFTs started happening and I was on SuperRare, I was surrounded by some really amazing art and moreso the artists who were making the art. We were a little family and all inspiring each other and experimenting. I never felt ANY competition from others and I never tried to compete. I was so taken back by what was happening that I began to use a portion of my art sales earning to reinvest into the ecosystem. Part of me was collecting art that hit me just in the same way as the LA gallery days, but this time it was different. I KNEW these people and I wanted to capture that magic in a way that spread some love back around and inspired new thoughts. 

I have a pretty vast collection after 3 years of being in crypto art and NFTs. When I look at them all together, its really cool because I can definitely break my colleciton into several major chunks of interest. I was all-in back in 2018 just as much I am in 2021. I am even more all-in because all the speculation about where this was all headed was just that, a “dream”. But dammit, we made those dreams a reality. Everyone did. No single artist can be pinned down as the “one” who did it. That is why my collection means so much to me. It is time capsule of all my really cool and talented friends creating art and expressions for the pure love of art making. 

CRYPTOART MONETIZATION GENERATION

MK: Thank you for saying so! I have a very strong mind’s eye. I describe what I do as “tuning” into color. It’s something I remember doing as a young child with our black & white TV and later rediscovered when I was a young man developing into an artist. I focus and tune my mind to see colors that aren’t actually there. It’s most effective while I’m in a flow state and I look at something absent of color, like a black & white photo. I’ll see colors in my mind’s eye and lay one down. And sometimes I inject my own intellectual ideas about color which rival what I’m seeing in my mind’s eye. The process is a bit like jazz music’s call and response. As I lay a color down, the colors I see around it change and I’ll then respond to that. This process began 20 years ago with acrylics and gel pens over photos printed on paper. But it really extends itself so naturally into my software, where I can rapidly integrate my “tuning” into my creative production.

“One of Us” Variation 1

MK: In those early years of 2014 – 2017, I was contemplating how on earth I was eventually going to bring any of my work to a market. I didn’t necessarily want to feel forced into creating physical prints just in order to satisfy a market’s demand for physical goods. A paper certificate of authenticity felt weak and incorrect. The next best thing was a diamond encrusted, gold gilded USB drive held in a cedar box. None of these things appealed to me and so probably delayed me even trying to bring my digital art to a traditional brick and mortar gallery. And of course I was struggling financially. I had run through my life savings during the time that I built my digital art studio software. I was fortunate to be in position that I could take on occasional web development projects again to make ends meet.  

Visionary Founder – Jesse Powell

MK: I first read about art on blockchain in the Summer of 2017, a week before the release of CryptoPunks. I looked around immediately for places like SuperRare but I couldn’t find anything yet. I knew blockchain was a better technology than flimsy paper certificates of authenticity were for provenance. And I knew smart contracts could solve lots of problems, like secondary sale royalties, that have existed in the traditional art market. My hesitancy to join was in looking out for the interests of my previous collectors. If I minted NFTs, they’d be representative of artworks that I held as high, if not higher, than my oil paintings which had sold for thousands. I took time to watch the market and be sure I was willing to take that risk. Eventually, I came to terms that I should jump in and contribute to building this market by joining it. Most of us were willing to sell work for far less than we valued the work in USD, understanding we’d eventually make up the value by HODLing.

TAKO

MK: The wise ones in this space realized we weren’t building markets or careers for ourselves, but for future artists. That’s still the case. Digital tools are likely the present and future of popular expression. The foundations we set by our choices would have and will continue to have a loud echo. As I felt embraced by the community, it was like a warm hug. And I increasingly wanted to squeeze back. I felt like I was finally in the right place at the right time and it seemed like I was uniquely equipped with certain life experiences that would be of benefit here. That’s what I needed. I still wonder sometimes if I am locked in a coma having an elaborate dream, because it seems so unlikely to have been a part of all that I have been. 

M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #1

MK: As a child, I learned about black holes by visiting planetariums and I became obsessed for a brief time at the age of 5 with the 1979 sci-fi Disney film, “The Black Hole.” I was fascinated by the black hole’s invisibility, gravity, size, and the concept of transporting to unknown location and maybe even time travel. I’d sometimes lay in bed with my eyes closed and imagine what it would be like to travel through one and come out the other end. 

For many years I internalized 2013 as being this period of time that I entered a personal black hole after the loss of my friend that year. There are these lost years with flattened memories between then and when I rejoined society in 2019. I’m not sure that those years were as much about my dedication to coding and creating my software as they were dedicated to avoiding feeling anything real. If I spent the day thinking about geometry and algorithms, then I wasn’t bothered by feeling my emotions. But at the same time, I was building something. And I knew I’d be able to create with what I was building one day. I’d come out the other end of my personal black hole and be at a destination I couldn’t have imagined. I’d be transported and transformed.

April 10th, 2019, the first image of a black hole was revealed to myself and all of humanity. I immediately set on painting it. Before seeing that image created by the Event Horizon Telescope, the metaphor I’d been using for my life was faceless. So now to finally see this thing, which had captured my imagination for so long.  Everything happened that single day. I created the black hole painting and a rudimentary way of capturing a dataset representing my grief. And then I’d expose the painting to that dataset, skewing the locations of all the components that made up that painting. It all took place that single day. The series intended to investigate the aesthetics that result from diverged paths, where all that goes wrong is sometimes made right. I wanted to transform what had been such a dark chapter in my life into a more beautiful, purposeful one. This is right before joining cryptoart and minting my first NFTs.

M87 Black Hole Deconstruction #9

MK: The nature of deconstructions, in literary terms, is that a text does not have a fixed meaning. Reading a book 20 years ago compared to today  takes on a different meaning. This is the first M87 Black Hole Deconstruction I’ve minted since May, 2019. There are only 9 of these deconstruction artworks that I made. We know what the work, at it’s conception is about; the transformation of paths gone askew. So how can we read this work differently from the previous, which were my very first NFTs? Have my contributions the last 2+ years to CryptoArt culture, NFT technology, and the future of art become part of what this work now represents? I like to think so. And then it’s also exciting that viewers come to this work with their own experiences and can enter it from their own perspectives about black holes and transformation. I love that art is open to interpretation– and although I provide some clues to my own personal meaning, this is not the only reading to make!  

MK: Broadly I love fractals and recursion. My custom software was designed for the algorithms to be interoperable and work recursively. When I actually implement things from this feature, I get really unexpected visual results and oftentimes a violation of memory or a system crash! These are really interesting concepts to work with though.   

This particular work provides a clue about my work’s transformational aspects, as this is not a still image, but has been animated. These animations I make of my paintings are all seamlessly looped to create an infinity of experience. Part of my larger concepts is about using the passage of time, evolution of technology to transform and reinterpret my past work. All my digital paintings are made to be future proof where they’re able to be adapted to future technology. There are 3 deconstructions I haven’t minted. I don’t know if I ever will. But if I do, the timing and treatment will be a tell-tale sign of how to read that work and perhaps the whole series differently.