𝗗𝗼 𝘆𝗼𝘂, 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝘁 Artist/Collector Digital art since 2005 6529 meme artist portfolio: https://xitter.cf/t.co/opKjdAVoJb
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Joined May 2009
- Tweets21.3K
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- Followers3.7K
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shoneec retweeted
This is an important post for me, even though I don't expect anyone to read it or care about it. I'm not saying this to get sympathy. I'm saying it because I've become used to sharing the most important parts of my life and watching them pass by without anyone paying attention.
I feel sad for myself because I've reached a point where I'm connecting my art to putting food on the table for my children, after sacrificing years of my life defending freedom and human rights. It hurts to find myself having to prove that I deserve a decent life in a world I spent so long believing would never abandon people.
I spent three years in prison because of my beliefs. When I got out, I found that my mother had passed away. Then I lost my father and my three brothers. I tried to keep going, telling myself that I had to live in a way that would make the people I'd lost proud of me, and that I had to hold on to the principles I'd paid such a high price for.
While young people were leaving their country in search of a better future, I decided to stay. I got married and had three children. But the war became worse, and my wife left when life became more than she could bear. Then I lost my middle son because I couldn't afford to get him the treatment he needed.
I used to collect plastic and cardboard and sell them to support my family. I wasn't looking for a luxurious life. I just wanted a roof over my children's heads and enough food to keep them from going hungry. Then I lost my grandfather, and I had to take on the responsibility of raising my children alone, being both a father and a mother to them.
Despite all these losses, I never stopped believing in people, humanity, and freedom. I believed that the world whose values I had defended, despite everything I'd lost, would surely have something good left for people like us.
But today, when I look at my life, the family I've lost, the years I'll never get back, the future that slipped away, and my children, for whom I'm trying to provide the most basic necessities, I feel myself getting poorer while the road ahead keeps getting harder.
Today, I'm trying to make my art a way to survive, not just for myself, but for my children too, and to help marginalized and struggling artists like me. I work, I keep trying, I promote my art, and I ask people to give it a chance. But so often, I feel that everything I carry in my art, every story and every meaning behind it, counts for nothing in a world that only seems to notice those who have money and fame.
I don't regret defending freedom, and I don't wish I'd abandoned my principles just to live an easier life. But sometimes I ask myself: What is the point of defending a world you believe can be better and fairer, only to spend your life losing everything for it and end up unable to provide your own children with a decent life?
Maybe the free world I believed in wasn't a lie. But I'm beginning to feel that the decent life we were told every human being deserves isn't really a right that everyone gets to enjoy. It's a privilege that only a few are fortunate enough to have.
I'm no longer asking the world to make up for everything I've lost. Some things can never be replaced. I just want to be able to raise my children with dignity, to believe that everything I've sacrificed meant something, and to avoid watching my children pay the price for my belief in a better world.
What hurts me most isn't that I've lost so much. It's that I'm beginning to fear that the very world I've spent my life defending has no place for people like me.
And yet, I keep trying.
Not because life has been fair to me, but because my children deserve a chance I never had, and because I don't want to teach them that a person's worth depends on what they own.
All I've ever wanted is a world where people can live with dignity without having to sacrifice their entire lives just to give their children a simple, decent life.
Was that dream too much to ask for?
Day 2 of tagging @osseneth until they notice my art.
"Don't be square" is a special sculpture. It's made as a part of open edition of my sculptural series. It has been made into a real physical sculpture thanks to @ForgioArt studio, and exhibited at EthCC, Cannes this year.
shoneec retweeted
Loved designing this bottle for @mosa_center
So grateful to @siriuscrocodile for the opportunity to be part of such a cool project 🙏
🔗👇
shoneec retweeted
ORACLES 🧵
Oracles explore personal identity and the energies that guide us. Faces are obscured, yet they feel familiar. This collection reminds us of a Universal truth - magic is everywhere.
✦ LIVE on Oct. 19th
✦ 12pm EDT / 9am PDT
✦ Mint - Link below 🔗
Let’s dig in ↴
Closing in on 6 years in this space, I'm more lost than ever.
What does one even do to get seen here...
I've spent a year working on my SuperRare genesis piece, a 3:30 minutes short animation because I wanted it to be as best as possible and not come out as soon as I was accepted to "ride the hype". It had 3d sculpting, modeling, texturing, custom made soundtrack in full, and many other things. I wanted it to be as authentic as possible.
Delved deeper into sculpturing, minting fully interactive GLB models, very high quality textures, barely any UV seams, did my best to present the work in the best shape possible.
I've made a fully interactive, infinitely scrollable artwork that works on any platform and any device.
Developed collections that speak to each other, dual 1/1/50 sets of works.
I pride myself in not just the visuals but also technical part of my work.
I've been making digital art for over 20 years, with that time I've grown into my style, my themes and my visual presentation. I think I have strong identity as an artist, and that not many people are doing stuff that I'm doing.
With that said, I don't think I'm some sort of revolutionary, that would be very arrogant, but I do think that my work is good for what it is. What warms my heart is that most of the support for my art comes from other artists and not collectors. They see something in my work, even when I'm not sure there's something there at times.
I've tried a lot of stuff to get seen, but everything seems to be in vain. Posting regularly, commenting, interacting with my peers, supporting other artist (I did not support others just for my gain, I want that to be clear, just mentioning it as one of the things). I've made my website and had it for years now. I've posted in countless open calls, under Cozomo's posts, and every NFT event that transpired over the course of the course of 6 years of me being here. I've sent so many DMs to almost every collector in this space and I've gotten replies on maybe 5% of them. And I try to be respectful and approachable in DMs, and not just go "hey, buy my art". I've paid for checkmark so my videos are of higher quality when posting, so I can sort my available work in Highlights, I have recently even put out an Article with all my available work.
This isn't just about sales, but in general just feeling like you don't exist in a space that you devoted 6 years of your life to.
I'm from a small country, and at the moment I don't know of a single other artist from my country that's in this space. Having local network would certainly help, but there is none.
Is the solution to just tag @osseneth and hope for the best? Most big collectors stopped collecting completely and just share a post here and there from time to time. It hurts me to see so many people gone from this space, collectors and artists both.
Stuff that I make is weird, maybe even uncomfortable for some, but isn't that the point? I came in this space after having a 15 year career in various types of design jobs, where I got so sick and tired making what other people wanted me to make. NFTs were supposed to be freedom, for all of us creatives that had our own visions and not bowed down to what was popular. This space is everything but that at the moment. There are clear "metas" of what type of art works, what type of projects work and we just keep going in circles after a few years, and reusing old trends and presenting them as something new.
I don't even know where I'm going with this any more, I'm just very very tired after trying so hard for 6 years. This platform doesn't help either. I have 3600 followers and it feels like I have 3.
I am also extremely grateful for the people and groups I'm a part of with whom I can always talk to and come for help and support. You know who you are and it means the world to me, I would be gone from here long time ago if it weren't for you good people.
If you read all of this I want to thank you, and sorry for the rambling.
shoneec retweeted
your art isn't bad, it just hasn't been validated by five guys in a private Telegram group who call each other 'ser'
