Welcome to Artists Featured. A newsletter by an artist trying to support other artists.
This week I am taking a little detour from emerging artists. I had the chance and the pleasure of talking to Other World, who many of you probably already know for his deeply absorbing new-age-old-age mythical sceneries.
While I was doing the research on his art, I quickly realized that what I'd previously known as Other World was only a very limited sample of his broad style of visual experimentation.
I was mostly used to see his grand sceneries depicting biblical and other religious events, skilfully transformed into many colourful variations of what's true to humanity. In the perspective of a layman art appreciator in me, these were and are the flagships of his art. These are the body of art that Other World does.
These festivals of colours are always full of a plethora of cult-like characters he calls Fiends. They serve the purpose of showing the dark side of the human psyche. They are the darkness within us, artfully placed right in front of us so we can finally deal with them. We probably won't, though.
My questions on Other World and the answers to them came via a videocall. So while these are not word-to-word transcriptions, the essence of the conversation has been kept (and corrected by him).
Your art is obviously very mythological. Are you a big fan of myths or did this originate from some religiousness of yours?
I come from a Christian family, but I'm not too religious. I always really liked the renaissance era of art, and I think my artworks come across so mythical because they are based on art from this time. The artworks reflect my views on religion rather than being religious themselves. The themes I base my artworks on are very important, but I am not trying to recreate specific events.
My style came quite naturally. I started with digital art doing mostly collages and creating colorful and psychedelic works. I slowly started to incorporate illustration and it led me to where I am today.
I played around with famous artworks from history. I used them for my collages and illustrated over characters to make them more recognizable and give a modern twist. My current style developed as a blend between classical and contemporary art.
In most of OW's pieces things seem to be happening all at once. There is no time for rest, not even for you to take a breath. These artworks catch you and exhaust you with details and symbols sprouting straight from the roots of the collective human character.
Do yourself a favour and spend a few moments observing this pool of humanity's (un)doing. The bold colour contrasts and tragicomedy themes are just the beginnings of what his art conveys.
Although the main (or should I say the most famous) body of OW's art are the diverse Fiend-filled scenes, his art is by far not limited just to that. My favourite little (not so little) surprise during the research was the discovery of his experimental contract.
Can we talk a bit about the experimentation? I saw your SR contract with like 250 experiments. Is fiddling around and trying new things the activity you spend most of your time on art with?
I find experimentation very enjoyable and important. The Fiends - probably the main thing making his art so distinctive (author's note) - came to existence solely thanks to experimentation. I'd say that 80-90% of the creation time goes to making the planned artwork, which leaves about 10-20% of the time for experimentation.
Obviously struggles tend to appear. Sometimes I have to work on one piece, but feel like working on another. Other times, experimentation doesn’t lead to a successful result and I feel like I should have been putting that time into an artwork that I know would have worked.
That being said, experimentation is needed for growth and has led to the existence of my most beautiful works. Without experimenting, I would not have created the art that I am creating.
Other World understands and uses this whole contract basically as an on-chain provenance. I find that very interesting because despite this being quite an obvious use case for nfts, you rarely see artists minting for the sole purpose of keeping their sketches on-chain.
Talking to artists whom I admire and finding out they face the same issues as me is inspiringly grounding practice. It makes me understand that all of it is part of the game.
So, back to art.
You are by all means an artist. Although, you have also a very scientific background in biomedical engineering.. Can you tell what came first? Did you ever consider an art education?
I have always enjoyed great art. For a while, as a kid, I wanted to be a cartoonist, but other than that, I never thought about art as a realistic career choice. That's where science felt more down the earth. I also used to go to private art lessons for less than a year and I learned some important skills, but ultimately, I didn't like that I was being told what to create.
I feel like science and art are not so far from each other. Science is very analytical, but in my field it is also very creative in order to find solutions with engineering. My approaches to art and science are not too different. They both have analytical and creative aspects to them.
So for you and your life personally, are these two parallel or intertwined?
Parallel, but they affect and help each other quite a lot. Lessons and skills from science directly help my art career and the same is true in reverse. Finding some success in art had given me confidence that also carried its way into my science career. Now that I am done with my PhD, I am glad that I pushed through and didn’t quit.
It's not easy for me to pinpoint any one feature in his art that should be my favourite, but there is one specific kind of detail that I find very intriguing. And that's the way of how the Fiends' robes are coloured. Not only are they colourful, but each of them is literally bathing in contrast colours.
Generally, we tend to see shadows as darker tones of the same colour. Other World's practice is not afraid of using contrasting colours to show shadows. You can see red robes with blue shadows, purple ones with yellows or greens with pinks. Majestic.
I have always been a sucker for myths and religion-y themes both in traditional and pop culture, and despite my current art style I have spent many years through-out my education drawing demons, angels, knights and other Other Worldly (hehe) entities. So these pieces touch my soul to an extent not so much other art does.
Dancing while the world burns, laughing while surrounded by death. Bliss and suffering, terror and joy. Such and many more paradoxes in his art invite us to see and accept the human nature in all its' beauty.
Sometimes people forget that we come to this world to learn and to experience it all. And I am infinitely grateful that art like this will be always be here to remind us.
We are just people aren't we, it's normal that we forget why we came.
While I was writing this editorial, I heard myself many times say something along "Jesus, how this can be so good?"
The work on this gave me a great chance to dive deeper in Other World's style that I have always admired. Both researching and writing this was an absolute pleasure. I am grateful, lfg.
Links
Price ranges:
1/1s: usually mid to high tens of Ξ
Experiment pieces: Lower units of Ξ
Editions: Mostly up to 10 Ξ
Chains: Ethereum
Links:
Website: https://www.otherworldartist.com/
Farcaster: https://warpcast.com/otherworld
Twitter profile: https://x.com/otherworld_xx
SuperRare: https://superrare.com/otherworld
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