Artists promoted by innovative Scotland-based artist Trevor Jones have seen their earnings soar to a lot more than the typical annual salary in their home countries of Colombia and Cuba.
NurArt, from Cuba, and Colombian Saint MG are both enjoying rocketing financial success after featuring on Trevor’s Art Angels podcast.
A pioneer of non-fungible tokens in the art world, Trevor began the initiative in July to shine a light on emerging artists. Created in partnership with NFT Culture and SuperRare, each episode of Art Angels features a discussion with an emerging NFT artist and three NFT collectors. The artist creates an NFT and auctions the new work on exclusive crypto art marketplace SuperRare on the day they are featured, with the auction ending one hour after the end of their episode.
NurArt, 44, featured on the first episode of Art Angels and sold her first work Lucid Dream during the show for US$2,728 USD and another US$1,300 in sales of previously created work immediately after the episode.
She had been working in traditional art for more than 20 years before entering a relatively new version of the World Wide Web – Web 3, popular with artists, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, large technology companies and venture capital firms – and was spotted by Trevor Jones who saw the potential in her work, which focuses mostly on her inner world as she constructs a surrealistic firmament of symbolism expressed through human and animal figures. Full of ancient mysticism, her pieces feature recurring themes of feelings like loneliness, dreams, desires and love.
“Somehow I became visible for Trevor’s beautiful project Art Angels,” says NurArt. “It was a wonderful surprise. I felt that it would take me a long time to reach this market, because there are many artists in Web 3, which is like a gigantic sea, but Art Angels gave me the opportunity to enter through the wide door.
“It gave me, in that first space, the opportunity to make myself known on other levels and, of course, to sell my first work at a very good price and witness an incredible battle to get it.”
NurArt, who studied visual arts at the San Alejandro Academy in Havana, Cuba, now regards Trevor as a guide, mentor and friend.
Urban and classical hypebeast artist Saint MG, 28, featured on the third episode of Art Angels and saw his success soar as a result.
On the episode he discussed how he creates new variations of past masterpieces by mixing classical art and 21stcentury fashion and art. That piqued the interest of NFT enthusiasts and saw all the Columbian artist’s available pieces sell, with prices for his work shooting up following his appearance on Art Angels.
Saint MG, who trained in architecture and also conducted autonomous studies in history of art, created Art Dealer, which sold for 3.373 ETH (more than US$6000). Sales of his works on other platforms amounted to more than US$3000. And now, he can afford to make a living from his art.
“This space has given me, for the first time, the security that I can live from my art and do what I am most passionate about,” he says.
In his art, Saint MG reflects a renaissance and baroque that orbit in the dimensions of surrealism and science fiction with elements very typical of urban culture and the streets, the environment in which he grew up.
Trevor Jones is best known for his iconic Bitcoin Angel, based on his painting of Bernini’s baroque marble sculpture, The Ecstasy of St Teresa. A fine art graduate and traditional painter, he has worked at the intersection of art and technology for more than a decade. When he invested in Bitcoin in 2017 it inspired a new creative direction, leading to his crypto-themed AR paintings and his passion for NFTs in art.
He says: “Just over US$16,000 has been bought in primary and additional artist sales as a result of the Art Angels to date. And I’m delighted with the success of the space and to be able to help these fellow artists on the road to making a full-time living from their digital works.”