„I think the use of old baseball cards provides something tangible and familiar to the viewer.”

With his solo exhibition, Dialogue3, at Vellum LA in Los Angeles, thr33som3s offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of his notoriously labyrinthine world. Harkening back to the advent of generative art in the 1960s and 70s, when such art was still made by hand, thr33som3s’s generative practice, thr33zi3s, finds him physically altering existing paintings — often multiple times for a single work and over periods of time — as dictated by blockchain interactions with his collectors.

Through such interactions, thr33som3s encourages active participation in the creation and destruction of his work with seemingly no end in sight to the narrative possibilities and lucrative antics that can ensue.

LE MILE //
You started painting in your forties. What was your life like before then and what made you decide to start creating art?
thr33som3s //
Early in my life I put all my creative energies into baseball. When my baseball career ended, I took that focus and put it into creating businesses. By my forties, I found myself trapped in a mega-corporate structure that stifled that creativity, and I think that’s where I found painting as a necessary outlet.

Who are your artistic influences?
I think I’ve always drawn the most influence from cinema. Martin Scorsese, Sam Peckinpah, and Pedro Almodóvar for images; John Sayles and Ron Shelton for stories. I love the work of Christo and Jeanne Claude and draw great inspiration from their process, particularly their economization of their work in order to maintain absolute control of it all.

While you paint on vintage baseball cards, you often refrain from any “baseball” labels. What do you hope viewers can take away from the style of the paintings themselves?
I think the use of old baseball cards provides something tangible and familiar to the viewer. I hope my painting coaxes them to see beyond what they expect and know into, perhaps, a parallel dimension. Yes, it is just a baseball card, but the painted image forces the idea that it’s not. Something can be two things at once. It’s why I go back and forth between calling my work “paintings” and “cards.”

You purposefully misuse gouache when you paint?
Yes, it came early to my practice and it’s kind of the main medium I’m even familiar with, and I haven’t found anything else that lets me subtract as much as I add when I am changing a previously painted image.

If any of these characters could speak, what would they say?
Who’s to say they can’t speak?

When did your painting practice converge with the blockchain?
I first heard of blockchain in 2013, but I didn’t hear about collectibles or art on-chain until fall of 2020. By December of 2020, I was looking closely at options I might have to bring my paintings on-chain, and I minted my first piece on Tezos in June of 2021.

In a previous interview you call your “analog generative” approach to producing work “the purest form of generative art on the blockchain.” What do you mean by that?
Let’s just say, I don’t call the results of my generative work “outputs.” Work created by human hands, whose very essence can’t exist without generative blockchain interaction, is pretty damn pure.

Because you constantly alter your paintings, do they have an inherent ephemeral quality that you think adds to the experience of your work?
I like to think I play a bit of a game with my collectors and my work as far as the ephemeral goes. As long as I possess the painting and can alter it based on the ongoing dialog with the collector, none of it is permanent. But, as soon as I release the physical painting to a collector, then it is out of my control. At that point I can say it is finished. It's what I do with thr33zi3s, the most interactive of all my works, by charging the collector with the responsibility of choosing to continually evolve the painting and hold and use the NFT or to give all that up to claim the physical and put an end to its evolution. I let the collector, in essence, determine when the painting is finished.

The Grotto is full of those merely observing on the “bleachers” to those who are fully entrenched in this conceptual universe, managing different teams, assuming different roles. What do you think motivates someone to tip the scale from curious spectator to die-hard believer?
The Grotto came for the money and they stayed for the culture.

You offer the Grotto a lot of freedom of choice when it comes to how work is collected, alters, and evolves over time. Has there been a moment when the Grotto surprised you or changed the way you think about your relationship to offering them, essentially, free will?
We are only a little over two years into the Grotto aspect of the project, and they're still getting their footing and understanding how very much they affect the volume and structure of my work. If anything, I think I've been surprised at how willing they are to dive into that aspect of the project and their courage to destroy work worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars in exercising that power to guide my creations.

In your upcoming exhibition, Dialogu3, at Vellum LA, what dialogues do you hope to convey to the uninitiated viewer? Are there any dialogues you wish to explore further?
On the surface, the title refers to the conversation between me and my collectors that takes place via the blockchain. But as this show and this particular work reaches new eyes, I want it to prompt an inner dialogue between the viewer and their very own concept of art. Has their conversation with a work ever gone beyond viewing it or owning it? Have they even considered an active participation in the work? How would they behave with a piece if a continuing dialogue with the artist were possible? In exploring these thoughts, I hope they can start to imagine what is possible with blockchain and start to demand it of their future collecting.

In Dialogue3, for the first time, you are exhibiting physical and blockchain-backed paintings together. What do you hope one communicates about the other?
I don't think most people get a true sense of the size and scale of my physical paintings as most of the time they are seen on screens. So, there's certainly something exciting about seeing the physicals at 2.5"x3.5" in rooms where they are being shown digitally, as large as 6' tall each. Beyond the size, I hope the viewer is drawn into the thr33zi3s paintings to see the particular traits the blockchain decided I would paint, then to look up as all of my work literally floats around the room. One would be able to search out the specific components of a given painting by finding its corresponding paintings in the rest of my work. I think it will be a fun treasure hunt of sorts. It also looks forward to all the possible combinations in future thr33zi3s generations that lay ahead as my oeuvre grows and expands.