Projects
![]()
No projects found
Investors
New
DAO Treasuries
DATs
Lend / Borrow APRs
Chains
Categories
Spaces
Studio Hour Ep.4: mendezmendezmendez
Recorded: Feb. 4, 2026 Duration: 1:04:27Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent discussion, digital artist Mendes Mendes shared insights on his growth through daily art creation, a significant partnership with a university researcher, and the evolving landscape of art monetization, including potential yield opportunities in the blockchain space.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Music Thank you. Music Thank you. Well, hello, everybody.
I'm just going to do a sound check.
Can you hear me?
Gemma?
Yes, can you hear me?
Perfectly.
Also, I never realized your name was
Chema. That's very Catalan.
That's a very
Barcelona name. It's
Catalan or Murcia, actually.
It's from Spain.
Neither of those
places. Where are you from in Spain?
The north of Spain, Asturias. I was born there.
My family moved to Canary Islands.
And then they moved to the Caribbean, where I grew up for most of my life in the Dominican Republic.
Oh, my gosh. Amazing.
Both sound like amazing places to grow up in yeah i knew a guy who
was also called chema who said he was from murcia which was um
you know also in spain and like the land of gaudi um but he said it was a very common name there, which is why it rang a bell for me.
It comes from Jose Maria, which is my full name.
So in Spain, we have some like abbreviations,
like typical abbreviations of common names.
So Jose Maria, the abbreviation for that is Chema.
If your name is Jose, just Jose, a lot of people call you Pepe.
And yeah, so that's where it comes from.
See, I keep learning new things about the country that's literally next door to mine.
Because, you know, back in Lisbon, we learn a little bit about the Spanish but we don't learn
that much other than our historical past of course but that said I'm gonna get things started
because I see that the room has filled up so welcome everyone to Studio Hour. Today we're sitting down with Chema,
also known as Mendes Mendes or Mendes Mendes Mendes. Do you prefer two Mendeses or one Mendes?
So I mean I guess I'm just doxing my full name here. Mendes Mendes is my actual last name,
it's Mendes twice but like when I go to events and stuff like that I usually just here. Mendes Mendes is my actual last name. It's Mendes twice. But like when I go to events and stuff like that, I usually just go by Mendes.
Perfect. Mendes it is. So Mendes has been making digital collages for a while.
And throughout these past few years, we've seen a lot of growth in his work and especially last
year I've noticed something changing where the work got looser and a little bit sharper too
and we'll get into this more as we get more into this space but he pulls from classical painting modern imagery 3d and whatever
else is nearby and he turns everything into these beautiful surreal layered images that feel very
precise without being overly precious so we're going to talk about process perfectionism daily creation and then how showing up every day quietly rewires people's
practices with that introduction said i do want to shout out the sale that you just did you want
to tell us a little bit more about that yeah so thanks for the introduction. That was really sweet. This sale came about from the daily practice. Like you said, something clicked in the past few years, and that's 100% attributed to my daily practice. for over 16 years since 2009 but I always took a an approach like a slow burner approach to art
like I would take my time with it a couple days a week sometimes two weeks to make a piece
always within the same framework that you mentioned where like I would use any like I'm
medium agnostic in in the sense that I will I'll use some 3D in the sense that I'll use some 3D.
I'll use photography.
I'll use old paintings, illustrations.
I'll use whatever I have at my disposal to make whatever art I envision.
And so from all the unexpected consequences that the daily practice has brought to me, one of them has been the non-Web3 sort of opportunities
that have arised.
And this one was just one of those.
Like Greg Porter, who's the, he runs a lab
out of University of Pennsylvania in the psychiatry
and neuroscience department and he
just reached out in September of last year saying that he's been following my art on on x for a
while and that some of the pieces that I some of the pieces and motifs that I use uh recurrently
um sort of like they they're a good fit for a research paper that he was working
on for the past three years and he inquired for a to co uh to commission a piece to accompany the
research paper that he was about to release on um nature the biggest science of publication in the
world right now so that was amazing like, and not only that, like that,
that's one example of many other licensing
and opportunities that have come through the daily practice
that are outside of NFTs and stuff like that.
So yeah, it's been such a treat to just connect
with book publishers, magazines,
like scientific papers, universities, through my art, it's
really been incredible, completely unexpected.
It's such a cool crossover.
I really, I was so happy for you when I saw this, and it was super recent.
Maybe I saw the news two hours ago.
So it's super, super cool.
And with that said, you mention um you tended to be medium
agnostic so i kind of wanted to flip things a little bit and like ask you how would you
describe what you do without saying digital collage that's an interesting question. Without saying the Yusokalash, I just open the fridge and grab whatever ingredients are
there and try to make as delicious as possible.
You know what, that's an excellent answer.
I think it's really cool.
I think it's amazing how you're able to pick out on so many different elements
and bring them together into something cohesive.
But also with that in mind, I kind of wanted to know also,
what was the first image or what would you say was the first image
that you created that really felt like you,
like something you really resonated with.
So yeah, that was back in 2009. And by the way, the term digital collage I use as more of a
technicality because I really stay away from the traditional aesthetic. You know, like in a collage
you can clearly see where there's a lot of different elements
from different sources put together.
Oftentimes, you can see like, you know, creases on paper or like rupture edges or, you know,
like a little bit of like leftover, like, you know, there's a specific aesthetic to
use a collage.
And I use the term because it's the closest thing there is to it.
But really, I'm combining techniques from digital collage
and also compositing that is usually
made for advertising or movies or set production,
where you have to not only bring together
elements, but you also have to make, like, glue them together,
not in the literal sense, but in the aesthetic and visual sense.
Like, you have to match all the lighting.
So like, you know, things really, like,
seem like they're in the same place.
You have to add shading.
You have to make sure that the objects or elements connect with each other in a way that they feel like they were meant to connect with each other.
So the ultimate goal of my pieces when I collage together different elements is to make a final piece that doesn't look like it was put together with different sources.
Rather, it looks like a finished painting.
So that is accomplished by sourcing from paintings.
And also, now that I've introduced AI in my workflow,
I make sure that whatever is the output from these AI tools,
they have the oil painting aesthetic.
Now, back to the question.
In 2009, two of my closest friends
passed away in a car accident.
And I've been making digital art for already over 10 years.
No, that's a lie.
Not over 10 years.
Maybe around five since the early o's.
So I already knew how to use photoshop i had already graduated from from
college with a communication design degree and so i was really well versed in and in digital art
tools but the only thing i was doing with that is creating you know branding projects i was doing with that is creating, you know, branding projects. I was doing advertising. I was doing websites, the typical commercial designer artist pathway sort of. And so it's
very much a cliche, but when people close to you pass away and you, you know, and you're supposed
to be like, you were supposed to be in the car with them and stuff like that, you, you know,
it poses the very existential question of like, whoa, like if I had
these to exist at that moment, what was going to be left of my creation, right? Like I've always
been a creative person since I was a kid. So for me, it's always, I've always had this idea of like
leaving behind something that people can look at and connect with after I'm gone.
So the idea of the only thing being left behind
was like logos and websites really sucked.
So that's when I began my practice.
And yeah, I mean, I was, I still remember this thing.
I was like re, I was redesigning my website
for the 19th time.
And I guess I was redesigning my website for the 19th time, and I guess I was super high and just
started putting in elements in Photoshop that had nothing to do with my website.
I started playing with asymmetric angle geometry, and one thing led to the other and I put inside the project file a really old
photograph of a lady covering her face with a veal and that became my first piece. I was
listening to an artist called Felix Levand and he also creates his own covers with Digital Collage.
There was a bit of a bit of a inspiration from the music that I was creating.
Now I'm very curious what kind of music?
It's hard to explain what Felix LaVan sounds like like actually it's very trippy like I would say
no I don't think there's like a very left field sort of music like very experimental
there's none genre specific okay that's it's pretty cool would you feel like you use music still a lot in your process
and has your relationship with music as part of your practice changed or evolved over time
100 i even even back then i was already producing music i've music. Music and art for me has always gone hand in hand,
whether it's I'm listening to music
and I'm paying attention to,
like a lot of the artworks that I create
in my daily practice now,
not the majority, but like a good percentage
are directly inspired by either a song title
or a piece of
lyric from a song. So music and it's always has always had a very direct influence in my art.
That's pretty cool. Are there any particular like if you could give me three or four musicians
you really gravitate towards other than the stuff you also make
who would they be who would you say are like four people that you tend to go to when you
want to get really creative um and it really depends on how i'm feeling uh because i really
i really believe that in every genre of music there's there's good music like
like like lately for example like in these past few weeks i've been listening to a lot of like in every genre of music there's good music.
Like lately, for example, like in these past few weeks,
I've been listening to a lot of like classic reggae,
like Rarrington Libby.
So I've been just like rinsing his albums.
Then I, sometimes I love Blue Note,
the jazz record labels, a lot of jazz.
Sometimes, like, my favorite thing is just, like,
pick one song that I love and go on Spotify
and hit, like, go to Sound Radio
and just listening to music that's related
to something that I like.
But, like, in more contemporary musicians,
like, Ten Impile is really great.
Sometimes I go back to the first albums of musicians that I really like.
The first Coldplay albums are amazing.
Massive Attack.
I love the 90s.
The 90s scene for me was the best.
Most of my favorite musicians came out of the 90s thing for me were the best sort of like most of my favorite musicians came out of
the 90s and early o's um you know that sample heavy uh like style of producing uh like daft
punk uh prodigy um you know all the triple bands like massive attack
just muted myself sorry portish head is like probably one of my favorite bands ever
yeah i was going to say i can definitely i i was looking at one of your works um you posted this
maybe yesterday um the one with the very wait let me try and pin it really quickly.
With this starry sky and then a skull kind of breathing out. And then there's this really interesting mix of the cosmos being within and
without like the idea of a microcosm and the microcosm.
And for some reason, this really reminded me of a Daft Punk song.
And it makes a lot of sense that you're inspired by that kind of stuff.
I would also imagine you would listen to a fair share of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, which is a mouthful to say.
But your work definitely reminds me of some of their stuff as well.
And I was wondering, looking back on your work,
what is one thing you still really love about your earlier pieces?
That's a good question.
That's a good question.
Well, since I used to just take my time with the pieces, there was a lot of focus on detail
and very intricate relationships of elements within the piece.
So I would try a lot of things. Like if you look at my early work,
like from the 2010s and stuff like that,
you'll see very like intricate compositions
with like dozens and dozens of different elements
put together.
So in a way I do kind of miss that, you know,
like there's something about taking your time with a piece and
let it let let it simmer and like go back in a couple days and like do you know like multiple
sessions on top of the piece um but you know i think the artist's journey goes through phases
and right now i'm in this daily practice phase where I'm discovering, like, it's been so rewarding to just through experimentation to discover new styles and new techniques and to expand those into like mini series.
To the point where I have no idea what to do with all these mini series.
I mean, 750 works in two years.
And I will continue creating daily works
until I physically can't anymore.
So it's going to be interesting to see how these end up,
you know, like, how am I going to mint all of them
just for provenance sake
without even the intention of selling them?
Will some of these series just be forgotten?
Will they come to the blockchain in a year or two or 10?
It's going to be super interesting to see
how this vast inventory of work sort of like evolves
and what the relationship of this work
with the blockchain will be in the future.
That's super exciting.
That's a lot of work you're putting out, which I think is really nice.
It's a good problem to have having too much output, in my opinion.
But with that said, would you say,
are you more of an idea first or composition first
type of artist? Because, you know, if you're producing this much work on a daily basis,
I wonder how often do you start off with a composition and then you ideate more on that,
or if you have an idea and kind of develop that instead?
or if you have an idea and kind of develop that instead?
It's not one or the other.
It really depends on the day, on how I'm feeling,
on if I'm inspired or not.
That's the thing with a daily practice.
You have to make something whether you want to or not,
whether you're inspired or not, whether you have ideas or not.
But once you start this daily practice,
something becomes very apparent right away
is that you enter in this sort of economy of ideas.
So you, like, after a few months,
your brain starts to rewire itself
to be on the lookout for inspiration
way more than it used to be.
So that's where, like I mentioned before,
that's where like you start paying more attention
to song lyrics and like you start to like allow your brain
to visualize more often
and because you need to create something soon.
So like I have a notepad with a bunch of like little notes,
ideas, like concepts that if one day I'm super uninspired,
I can go back in there and like just grab one and see what it takes. So some days I have like a
vision, you know, like a straight up like the muse, whatever you want to call it, I have like a very
exact, precise and very, very detailed vision of what I'm going to do. And those are the easiest days, especially with like tools now
that you can generate specific elements or human form
in very specific poses.
Like you can tell the thing, oh, like generate, you know,
like a sculpture of a guy in this angle doing this thing in this pose.
And that becomes the basis of the piece.
Other days, for example, the one you referenced, the one that's called across the threshold with
the human form and the split creating this tangent across the face and the skull above and the sky.
tangent across the face and the skull above and the sky.
That one, I just, I liked the pose of the human that I had generated.
And I just threw it in Photoshop and started playing with it without any idea of what will
come out of it.
I just, I remember I began just distorting the face through this weird tool that Photoshop
has called content-Aware Scale.
And I was trying to distort the face,
compress it and uncompress it, compress it and uncompress it
to see if I can get some interesting glitch on the face,
similar to what Cider does, which I think I figured out
how he does this stuff through this experiment.
And that didn't work out.
And then I just, one thing I use AI for is to grab one image of like a human form and
then ask it to create the same thing, but instead of the flesh of the human form, but
to create the skeleton of the human form matching the lighting and matching the pose.
And that way I have two
layers now I have the flesh and I have the skeleton and now I have something to play with
and yeah and through the process through the process I'm also allowing myself to think of the
title which becomes the concept and if I can reach a good title while I'm creating the piece,
then I can lean into the title and make it more obvious and just sort of tie it together, the title, the concept, and the piece.
That's the perfect segue for my next question,
which is when do you know or how do you know when a piece is finished?
That's a good question.
I know when it's done, when I stop hating it,
in a way.
Like making art is not a linear process
where it starts raw and it gets more beautiful linearly it's like sometimes it's like
you start with something and then it turns into like a pile of dogshed and then you have to work
really hard like turning into something decent and then something clicks you're like oh okay now
we're now we're working with something like here. And once that happens, then you do the final touches, the here and there.
And honestly, also there's a time constraint.
Like more days than not, I'm like, well, it's two in the morning.
I have to go to bed.
I guess today's day is going to be this piece of shit.
And I just put it out.
it out there's no there's no way of short recording it see your usage of the verbiage
There's no way of sugar carving it.
piece of shit is giving me um this whiff of perfectionism um and i know with daily creation
it's kind of difficult to have it so what made you was this what made you kind of shift away from perfectionism was this
challenge of daily creations yeah in a way um I think perfectionism is not a good thing I don't
think it's uh I think it's good to have attention to detail I think it's good to have attention to detail. I think it's good to strive to create, like, good work.
But I think you can get lost in perfectionism and arrive in a place where you become really insecure about what you're doing because you can always work on a piece.
So I think, well, the way I, the reason I started daily practice is because I was in a very creative brought.
Like, I was really, like like I had no new ideas I didn't know what I wanted to do in late 2023 so um 2024 began and I
just set out to create a one piece per day for 20 28 days I gather some friends together to accompany me with in this, in this
project. And right away, I mean, probably because I've been using Photoshop for more
than 20 years. So I'm, I'm very agile. I don't, you know, like, I don't have to, you know,
when you're learning a piece of software, you have to like look up a tutorial for everything
you have to do. Like I haven't seen a Photoshop tutorial in 15 years.
It's my second language, basically.
So I quickly realized that I was able to create fairly decent work in a span of three or four hours if I really focused.
And so, I mean, if you go on my website
and look at my dailies, if you scroll all the way down,
you can see how the style has shifted and sort of evolved
over time, especially with introduction of AI in my workflow.
I mean, regardless of using AI or not,
the works still take two to three hours
to complete every single day.
But yeah, there's no more perfectionism.
Perfectionism, I'll allow myself to give it up my all in two or three hours,
and then it's published.
And if it tanks or if I don't like sometimes like i hate to
say it but like you know the the way that people engage with the work does have an effect on on how
i perceive the work as well i i hope i wish it didn't, but it is feedback in the end, right?
But there's something interesting that
happens where if
I create something that I know
that it's good and I know
I like it and I'm proud of it,
I couldn't give a fuck if
two people liked it.
And the opposite
is true. And sometimes it's
like I put out something that I
really I'm not proud of and for some reason you know I guess like 50,000 likes I'm like why
how does even like what is this like it's so weird um yeah I guess I got myself into a rambling
situation so I'll just give it my back to you I mean first of all feel free to ramble as
much as you want I I was thoroughly enjoying that but you know you were talking about how
there's this time constraint and then you know making daily work and how people react to it
and you know that feedback loop and I kind of wanted to know what's harder for you.
Is it making this daily work and then sharing it?
So what I mean by this is, do you find the creation process more difficult
or the sharing process where you have to kind of process how people receive your work?
Well, I've gotten better at it um because because you post you know the same sort of format or in the same sort of like
content every single day you get a sense of how a piece will do socially, let's say, in the first few minutes.
But then, like, you know, fucking they changed the algorithm.
And now you're like, you have no idea what's going to happen.
So lately, I just, like, post it.
You know, it's posted in Ghost.
You know, you post in Ghost.
You just post it and you open it again next day in the morning and whatever.
It has 50 likes. it has 500, great.
I'm getting a lot better at not caring.
That said, if two weeks go by
and I don't have a piece that really resonates with people,
I do go back and think, okay, what was I doing before?
Can I go back and think, okay, what was I doing before? Like, can I go back into like one of those pieces that work really well and study and see and sort of like dissect the why.
There are some pieces that resonate with people more than others.
And, but there's always a mix, you know, like it's very easy to get captured by the audience
and and it's very easy to get hooked on likes and and and engagement and and but that's not
the reason why i do it right the reason why i have a daily practice is because i am truly of true creation. I really cannot not do it. And the daily practice has really allowed me to
expand my visual language and explore new concepts and new ways of creating. And like I said before,
I used to create, you know, like one piece every couple weeks and I would make a piece and then I
would try to sell it as an addition or like if it was something special, really try to move it as a one-on-one.
And I was in this create, sell, create, sell, create, sell.
And if something didn't sell well, then I was stuck in a really bad position.
Whereas now it's like selling becomes some sort of like necessity to just move things around,
but not the main purpose. The main purpose remains the act of creation. Selling becomes
secondary once you have such a vast inventory of work that selling becomes an obvious thing. It's
like, oh, now I know exactly how I'm going to sort of like frame
this new drop or new collection or new series.
It really changed my whole perspective,
not only in the creative process side,
but also in the minting and networking side.
That's really, really interesting. And i was kind of curious to know out of all of
the daily work you've produced is there a piece you keep coming back to
maybe i mean there's one that sort of hunks me it's called balance i created on day 126 and that was like the first piece that i
created that uh hit like a it had a a little viral moment and it became a meme in in the
spiritual and metaphysical content universe out there in social media.
And so it's been mean to oblivion.
I mean, I don't know, like between platforms and all the different accounts that have mean that it's gotten like in the tens of millions of views.
Anytime I go on Pinterest to like see, I mean, there's days where like I go on Pinterest to like see um I mean there's there's days where like I I go on Pinterest and and see
and just to get some new things in my in my in my mind and it just I always see it there you know
so like it's not that it comes to me I um like just by default it just like it's it's sharp
into my face like on a constant basis
that's kind of cool bumping into your work on pinterest um to be fair i have seen your work
on pinterest before and um it's always pretty exciting when you see someone you're familiar
with or you know um out there in the wild. So I was kind of also wondering about people
and things that influenced you.
We've spoken about music,
but I also wanted to know about other fine artists.
So I think I read somewhere that you're really into Escher,
Magritte, Miles Johnson maybe and Eduardo Recife. I don't know if these are like
the right people but they are definitely some of the influences I see in your work.
So I was kind of wondering what did each of them kind of unlock for you that you couldn't articulate back in the day and you can now?
Yeah, so Eduardo Recife was the main inspiration for my initial sort of like digital collage era.
collage era. He has like the classic digital collage aesthetic where he uses a lot of blending
modes on like very rough areas. He's really good at blending very rough aesthetics with very refined
aesthetics and details in the same image. And so I really, I studied his work quite a lot
during my first years and he was very influential in me.
And then Miles Johnson, he's, yeah, he,
he, in my opinion, is one of the best like painters
that focuses on capturing human emotion.
And he's also another, I mean, I probably ripped him off a couple of times with my dailies,
subconsciously, maybe sometimes consciously as well.
Because that happens a lot with the dailies.
Like sometimes you're like, oh, I'm just going to take this piece and make it in my own style for today's daily.
Because once you get into the daily practice, there's a lot less pressure into what you're creating.
You're just doing something.
You're not trying to sell it.
You're not trying.
A lot of the pieces become studies more than
just um finished pieces and so and yeah and then magreed and and escher are my favorite uh just
my favorite painters and and illustrators uh magreed had such a clean and and surreal style
there's my greed had such a clean and and surreal style like like yeah it's uh it's hard to describe
but um he has a very almost i would say almost graphic design aesthetic i don't know why i keep
saying that it doesn't really make sense when i say but in my head it does i don't know why it's
like it makes sense he was quite minimalistic and very restrained when he created work.
And he had a lot of restraint in the line work.
So maybe that's where it's coming from.
It was also quite a good mix of flat and 3D.
Yeah, probably. Yeah, it's also illustrative and it's so clean and sharp. And I obviously have appropriated his sky texture
on human form in my work.
And in a way I see it as a continuation of his work
in the 21st century.
And so yeah, and then Escher is just,
Escher for me just symbolizes the perfect match
between mathematics, geometry, and art.
I believe he basically invented the morphing, desolating patterns.
I mean, there's been desolating patterns throughout our history, going back to, like, Islamic mosaics and stuff like that. But they were not morphing in the way that Escher did,
especially adding a little bit of narrative into the pieces.
I think his work is just completely outstanding.
And I don't think there's been anyone like him after him.
Actually, now that you mentioned those mosaics,
I was wondering if growing up in Spain, I know you moved to the Canary Islands, but I was wondering if there was like a slight influence or you may have seen something of these mosaics and these geometries that maybe have carried out also into your practice now?
I don't think so because I really I literally was born in Spain and when I was one year old
moved to the Canary Islands and there's no Islamic here and seven years after that I moved to the Dominican Republic where the the art there is
completely different and very old days and very like a lot of landscapes and stuff like that
especially where I live which is Punta Cana a very touristy place and you see
the the typical like beach uh portraits and mountain port or sorry landscapes um in gift shops that was
all the art that i was exposed to uh but i even back then i was just always drawing always
painting doodling that was my my way of like passing time just drawing and painting
that's really incredible because you know know, looking at your work,
I would have thought you had been exposed to a lot of that kind of
more muted aesthetic because when I think of Punta Cana from my memories,
it's a lot of like really bright, saturated colours.
And I feel like your work borrows a lot more of that slightly mellower
shading that, you know, we see in Marguerite and we see in Escher, who tended to do most of his work
in black and white. So that's really, really interesting. Is there like an influence that
people never clock in your work, but you know, it's absolutely there?
people never clock in your work, but you know it's absolutely there.
No, I don't think so. I'm pretty open with my influences and inspiration.
But yeah, it's interesting that you say that.
And yeah, Punta Cana is bright.
Like everything's like neon color, like you turn the saturation up to 100 over there.
It's like the water is like turquoise
and all the vegetation is like neon green
and you have all these like super colorful flowers.
And there's some of that in my work, my early work,
that were a lot more colorful,
especially compared to like my recent work.
But I've always been kind of an emo kid, you know,
like I always like sad music and like that kind of stuff.
So I guess that comes through my art as well. It's it's so cool to see kind of like how
your surroundings can almost have like the opposite effect in your work
and it's it's really cool it's just so interesting to see all of these influences
yeah so I was kind of
going to shift now a little bit
into
like more practical things
in your practice
pardon the redundancy
so is there like one tool you would say you couldn't live without?
Yeah, Photoshop.
I mean, I would be fucked without Photoshop.
I mean, I could probably learn some other like GIMP or something else.
But Photoshop is my bread and butter.
Like I said, I've been using it since
like 2005 2004 something like that so like a good 20 years and yeah um I mean I this is a thought
experiment that I sometimes like carry out in my my head like okay if technology goes away tomorrow
like I can still draw I'm i'm beginning like a sculpture practice
now that it's gonna take me like years to a decade to like get anything decent done and i'm
expanding into like different mediums now that i have you know like last year was a really great
year for me and and not being not having to worry about like builds for a year or two really allows my creative mind what, like how, how, what I create will
outlive me. And I really think my thesis on this is that the only art that's going to survive in the next 5 to 10,000 years is going to be either stone carvings, like stone sculpture,
or blockchain art. That's the only thing that's going to survive. No drawings are going to survive,
no canvases are going to survive, because physically they decay, the decay right the only thing that wants to decay is stone sculpture
by default or blockchain art if we manage not to blow ourselves up and keep these uh
um these blockchains alive
damn um and i'm curious you're talking about sculptures and you just mentioned stone sculptures what kind
of experimentation are you kind of going into in your sculpture is it more of a tactile clay
type of thing or are you also experimenting with like a more physical three-dimensional collage
yeah I'm going like I'm diving straight into, like, the hardcore, like, stone sculpture,
like, chisel and, and, and hammer. It's, it's a lot harder than I thought, of course, as, like,
the Dunning, the, what is it, the Dunning-Kruger effect? So I'm realizing that it's going to take me many years
to start to get anything decent done.
But yeah, I got a few blocks of limestone
and I've been just sketching on top of them
and just hammering away pieces of rock
until I reveal something in the stone.
It's something that I'm not going to even share this online, any process or pictures
until I'm comfortable with what I'm doing, which will take years. So yeah, it's like, look, like
the oldest art in the world are cave paintings and stone sculptures. And that's for a reason. They would stand the cataclysms that the planet goes through. And my whole idea is like I want to leave behind a body of work that sort of documents the human experience in the 21st century to inform what we have achieved as a race to future civilizations that
um may look into what we did um the same way we are sort of constructing the past the past
by archaeology i you know i want i want one of my pieces to be dug up in 25,000 years and be like, oh, look, we just found this sculpture.
And what the sculpture will be remains to be developed and created.
But that's one of my big goals.
That and digital art on the blockchain, that's what I'm focusing on.
That's pretty cool.
Have you looked into any, like, types of chiseled stone sculptures
that you really like, like any influences?
In my mind, when you talk about that,
immediately I'm reminded of one of the places I live in,
which is Athens, where you have those in the past
and on, like like a lot of
ancient sculptures present.
So I'm wondering what kind of inspirations you're drawing from for that.
Yeah, mainly pre-dynastic Egyptian sculpture on really hard stone, like for example.
That's what, at the moment moment what's blowing my mind.
If you look at the most ancient stones
from pre-dynastic Egypt, it's a bit of a mystery.
It doesn't really make sense.
Like the quality of the stonework goes down
over time instead of increasing.
And so there's a lot of speculation as to how
that actually happened.
The sheer size of these sculptures
and the symmetry, the level of detail.
The symmetry in particular, it's really, really stunning.
Like, it almost looks 3D printed or something like that.
And you compare, like, pre-dynastic anatomy in sculpture
work with the more, like, recent, like, 2000 BC, for example,
or 1000 BC sculptures that come out of Egypt and they're imitating the
old work. The quality was reduced over time so that's the type of sculptures that I'm
getting inspired by. the features of the face
and the type of stone.
Think about it, quartzite.
Quartzite is one of the strongest stones that there is.
And we're creating this extremely precise
and symmetric works out of quartzite and basalt.
So that's what I'm studying now.
I live in a volcanic island, so like I have basalt so that's what i'm studying now i live in a volcanic island so like i have basalt work uh basalt stone sorry um everywhere around me and i live by a quarry
it's a sandstone quarry but i still like i have a lot of material around me to work
damn i i feel like you really do like a challenge because um both of those are pretty difficult to
work with so i really do applaud you um for that i'm posting in the comments a photo of a
i forgot how to pronounce this in English. It's basalt.
Basalt?
Basalt?
I guess we'll never know.
Basalt.
Got it.
Perfect.
Below.
And it is incredible.
And I can see why you would gravitate towards this.
I feel like, are you familiar?
This name now is not ideal, but are you familiar with Sir Jacob Epstein, the sculptor,
not the disgraced financier?
No, no, no, no, no.
He made this really, really striking sculpture.
He's like from the 1940s um which is called Jacob and the Angel
and it's made in alabaster which is a lot softer as a stone but I'm gonna post a picture below
because I feel like you'd probably enjoy this I don't know it has a slight Egyptian feel to it
and it's very like block-like um I think it's really beautiful and very like a
very cool portrayal of um a biblical tale um but I'll leave that in the comments so you can look
at it later and let me know what you think um oh my god okay we have seven minutes ish left um so i just wanted to ask a couple more
questions really quick are you more of a morning or a night maker like do you feel like your
creativity flows best in the morning or at night 100% at night like the first it takes me like hours and hours to like boot up the system um
I'm useless in the morning um yeah there's some like if I if I have like like I said before if I
have a very like a vision then I'll I'll be able to to work on it because it doesn't require like
a lot of creativity it's just like doing thing. But I cannot have creative sessions in the morning.
So in the mornings, I do more of admin stuff,
or I do more, yeah, just like answer emails,
do a little bit like socials.
I go over to-do lists and other projects and stuff
like that.
But my creative sessions are 99 percent
of the time happen after 9 or 10 p.m so like my from 10 p.m until 2 a.m is my sweet spot that's
where i i can focus like everyone's in bed and and i can channel more energy, more creative energy that way.
You're like the blueprint of a creative,
like the night owl thing,
the self-imposed restraint in the work.
It's so cool to kind of listen and understand.
Another question, do you prefer an accident or an intention in your work?
Wow, that's a cool question.
I almost want to say an accident because it's a good surprise. An intention is like, sometimes can be disappointing
because you have an expectation of a vision
and then you materialize and you're like,
oh, this didn't really work out as I expected.
But an accident, like the one that I created,
for example, two nights ago that you referred to,
that's like, oh, you're just playing around
and all of a sudden something happens, something clicks.
You move a layer that you were not supposed to move,
or you throw a texture in the piece
and it gets clipped between one layer and the other,
and you were intended to do it and that works.
So I think I would gravitate towards the accident.
Okay, this leads me to another interesting one.
Trust instinct or trust taste?
Oof, these are hard.
It's hard to choose one or the other.
Trust instinct or trust taste?
I don't know.
I don't know.
You put me in a weird spot there.
I always trust my instinct because it's like my my skill set like I know I'm able to do things
um I would say trust the instinct yeah my taste sometimes is questionable
I feel like this is such a trick question I I've asked it to some of my friends before
and I feel like everyone kind of reacts like that because sometimes your instinct and your taste are kind of blended together a little bit.
But I was just really curious to know what you thought.
Oh, another one.
Do you prefer fast and imperfect or slow and pristine?
Fast and imperfect um like the the thing about the my way of making art is that i can make
things happen really fast as opposed to for example an old painter where like it requires
a ton of patience and all that kind of stuff so yeah fast and perfect This is a bit niche, but do you prefer like using a stylo or a Wacom kind of board or a mouse?
I use both.
So I use my Wacom as like the mouse pad.
So the Wacom is always on the desk.
And for some things, the mouse is a lot more precise.
For example, when I'm working with paths, like vector paths,
I have to use the mouse because I get really, really precise.
But then if I need to do some shading or some,
some like cutting out an element out of its background, then I really need to use the Wacom.
So it's not either or. Those were great answers. I'm going to open the floor a little bit to see if anyone has questions.
And whilst I wait for people to request to come up, again, everyone's welcome. If you have
questions for Mendes, do feel free to request to come up on stage and we'll let you up.
to come up on stage and we'll let you up.
With that said, I still have more of these quickfire questions for you
whilst people get over their stage fright to ask questions.
Would you prefer have a signature style or be in constant mutation?
style or be in constant mutation?
Huh.
So, but I mean, through my daily practice, I found that you need both.
My, I do have a style that is recognizable now because it was very intentional.
Whereas I used to avoid repeating any elements in pieces.
Now I use the exact same clouds and the exact same Hubble telescope picture of a massive
star field in a lot of my work.
And so I think it's important to have a recognizable style, a signature style, like you mentioned, but it's
also a trap.
It's easy to get captured in the sense that you create your style, you find something
that works, you develop it, you get known for that style, and then you are afraid of
stepping out of that style.
So I think that that's also another perk of the daily
practice where through experimentation
and pure being sick of creating the similar work day after day,
you venture out into uncharted territory. And that's how my animated impressionist collection
came about last year.
I was just experimenting with new source material,
and I just hit something that really worked well,
and that became a new series.
And if you go through my dailies, which is a hard S
because it's 700 plus of
them and you get tired of scrolling, you'll see like spin-offs on something. You'll see
like a little mini series of completely different aesthetics that come out of the daily practice.
So I think it's important to have both.
That's incredible. And I monopolized this stage and we're about to hit time so i just
have one last question which is what would you still make if no one ever saw it
why would i what would i still make if no one ever saw it probably the I don't know that's it
that's a good question I mean I would still make art like I don't I don't make art for people to
see it really um I've always made art for just the sake of the creative process I'm just
that's when I'm happiest that's when I'm happiest,
that's when I'm like in the zone.
Like when I'm in the middle of creating something,
that's where, that's my happy place.
That's where, that's my special moment in the day.
So even if the internet didn't exist tomorrow,
like I would still make art.
Yeah, it's not a choice, really.
It's just what I've been doing my entire life, and it's just what I do.
So, essentially, both a vocation and a compulsion,
which is a wonderful thing, in my opinion.
Yes, absolutely.
So Mendes, Mendes, Mendes, Mendes, Mendes, Mendes.
Thank you so much for taking us inside your process,
way beyond the tools,
giving us a peek into your mindset,
your striving for legacy
and it's just wonderful to hear you talk about
curiosity, consistency
and letting these images unfold
on a daily basis
so for anyone listening
I really recommend you spending time
with Mendez's work
and if you can take a look and go through his dailies, please do.
You can see him in our last post.
So you can just click on that tag and go explore.
And thank you so much for joining us on Studio Hour.
It was lovely having you.
Yeah, thank you.
This was a great conversation um i love
the fact that you didn't send me like a google doc with like questions uh so i have no idea how
this was gonna go but i this is uh these are my favorite types of conversations where we just
sort of improvise and yeah thanks a lot for having me.
Like every single day I make a piece of art. They're all on my website, mendesmendes.com.
Go check it out.
And yeah, I'm always around, for better or for worse.
Always for the better.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you. This was awesome.
