"When I draw, I find peace of mind."
Today's Very Interesting Person is the one who first taught me about Marcel Duchamp's Fountain with a psychedelic, trippy NFT I collected back in 2021 and still hold to this day... Meet my Peaceful Groupie, by Yon.
And then, meet Yon, a relentlessly positive and inexplicably talented artist and illustrator from Argentina who brightens the Farcaster timeline on the daily with his trippy creations and quippy casts.
If you hang out on Farc for any length of time, especially in certain cozy corners like the /replyguys channel, you won't be able to escape the unbridled optimism and energy of Yon, a self-described "internet-native human creating art on the internet" and his distinctive brand of colorful illustrations and animations. (Oh and by the way, it's pronounced "Jon" not "Yon"... sorry if that bursts any bubbles.)
Yon's story is a pretty amazing one. He grew up in Chaco, a rural province of Argentina and one of the poorest regions in that country. His parents told him that art was not a career, but Yon begged to differ.
Against all odds, he has charted his own path as an artist, leveraging onchain technology and community-building along the way. As a young man, he saved up to move to Paris temporarily and worked in a hostel while doing freelance illustration work in his off-time, and then eventually made his way back to Argentina.
Doing this freelance work for a lot of international clients, and with a lot of challenges with receiving funds in his home country, he stumbled his way into crypto via accepting payment for his art in Bitcoin and Ethereum as early as 2017. From there, he began to learn more about the onchain ecosystem, and eventually began to understand that it could have applications for his art as well.
He began publishing his art on Rarible circa 2020 and quickly fell in love with this new medium allowing artists to connect in a symbiotic way with their collectors.
Fast forward to 2021, in the heat and froth of the NFT bull market, and Yon came up with the idea for PEACEVOID and the Peaceful Groupies, a 10,000 PFP collection HAND-DRAWN over 3-4 months and launched almost exactly 3 years ago today. Inspired by his passion for psychedelic culture, he created the now-iconic animated trippy backgrounds for the rarest Groupies, and built an iconic community of like-minded individuals from all over the world.
Yon brings this colorful, psychedelic energy to Farcaster... and pretty much only Farcaster. (He's barely active anymore over on X... many such cases, etc.)
I remember when he first arrived on the Purple App; as a longtime fan of his work it was amazing to see him dropping gm's in the chat and doing custom art on the fly. He understood the culture immediately, and he took the platform by storm.
At the height of the $DEGEN frenzy, you would find Yon on /replyguys every day, doing what replyguys do and also drawing custom animated versions of people's PFPs in exchange for $DEGEN tips (check out my own here... too good.)
He was bringing levity and positivity to the TL while also supporting himself with his art in a crypto-native way... the ultimate win-win.
Unfortunately, Warpcast would later deprecate support for animated pfps, but Yon has never let that harsh his groove. He continues to contribute art and culture to the network on the daily (while also bullying DWR about animated pfps at every opportunity.)
I had the great honor and pleasure to collaborate with Yon on one of our first Based & Yellow Artist Spotlights from The Yellow Collective and he knocked it out of the park. Almost 2000 people minted this illustrated piece featuring the first 100 Collective Nouns and it has been irrevocably added to the Yellow lore.
A few more of my favorite interesting things about Yon:
All of his art is CC0. As a fellow fan of public domain creation (all of our ZEROPOD.XYZ and other content from The Noun Square are released without licence as well), I really respect his encouragement of other artists to draw inspiration from his trippy world-building.
He is very thoughtful and intentional with his minting decisions as an artist. Many have asked him to mint the trippy pfps he has made for them, for example, and Yon would politely decline because he believes in curating his onchain body of work with an eye to intentional story-telling. I really respect that commitment.
He is relentlessly positive and always supportive of others.
If you're not following him on Farcaster, fix that now. And if you're not on Farcaster at all, fix that too -- I'll even cover your $5 subscription for the first year, just comment on this article with a way to get in touch and send you the free invite.
Yon also has an amazing Hypersub that gets you exclusive art drops, and you can subscribe to that easily here. Likes on this post summarizing his contributions to Farcaster will help him earn ETH from the ongoing Retro Rewards round being run by Purple and Octant. Learn more about the Peaceful Groupies and his trippy community on the PEACEVOID site.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading. If you are enjoying this series, please drop a comment and share it with your network on Warpcast and X. Let's make it known together that there is no shortage of Very Interesting People on the Purple App!
Big thank you also to Daniel Witcoff and The Bad Posture Podcast. I listened to his episode from 2022 featuring Yon to do background research for this profile and it is definitely worth the listen! (And by the way Yon, I would love to have you on as a guest on our next season of ZEROPOD.xyz to pick up where that pod left off. Slide in my DMs, you handsome devil.)
