“Life is too short to remain unnoticed”
– Salvador Dali
Surrealism strikes a balance between a rational view of life and one that acknowledges cathe power of the unconscious and dreams. The artists of this movement find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and uncanny, the overlooked and the unconventional.
The legendary Salvador Dali, one of the pioneers of the Surrealist movement, has spawned a generation of artists who explore a genre of art that can express their feelings and distinctive thoughts.
Even in this day and age of technological advancements, Dali’s influence in the art world is palpable.
Surrealist NFT artist Camibus and her artworks are a prime example of Dali’s impact on the art scene even decades later.
“If you don’t stand out, you’re not gonna make it,” is the lesson Camibus learned from her inspiration Dali. Not gonna lie, she literally embodies the concept of uniqueness!!
How it All Started
Camibus was born in the Transylvania city of Romania. She began her journey in the visual arts about ten years ago. It’s really surprising that she never drew when she was a child.
Camibus was encouraged by her parents to pursue music, and she fell in love with it. She was a member of several bands in high school and aspired to be a rock star.
She feared growing up and having to get a real job, even though she didn’t realize it at the time. She thought music was her only option. I wanted to be creative, but she didn’t think I could make a living as an artist.
Being an artist was something she read about in history books, but it was not a job Camibus could imagine anyone in our day and age actually doing.
Camibus majored in theater directing in college. It was not because she liked it, but because it was the only university in her hometown that was related to art and “allowed her to spend all day reading and looking at pretty things.”
In the final year of college, she worked as a clean-up artist at an animation studio. Camibus began drawing and painting at the age of 21. It was because of her boyfriend, who was also an artist, albeit an insanely talented one.
She was enthralled by his work. Camibus resolved to do everything in her power to catch up and acquire all of the necessary skills to work in the art field, despite the fact that she had no prior experience.
Camibus however suffered from impostor syndrome, and it took many years for her to feel satisfied with her own artworks.
The failures brought her to the brink of depression in the first few years, and it wasn’t until she stopped caring about the results that she found the balance that kept her continue creating art.
She spent the next ten years teaching herself to draw, reading every book she could find, watching YouTube videos, and spending all of the lunch breaks and evenings doing figure drawing and gesture drawing to improve.
Surrealism & NFT
Camibus heard about cryptoart in late January 2021, when someone invited her artist boyfriend to exhibit his work at a Decentraland gallery. Camibus was intrigued and read everything about cryptoart the next day.
She asked if she could also show off her work, and they agreed. The next day, she began working on the Figures collection. Although the gallery only opened in March, Camibus was already interested in experimenting with NFTs.
Camibus never imagined getting an opportunity to create her own original creative art until then. It was astonishing to have the opportunity to create art for the sake of creating art, as well as to develop her own style and voice.
She minted some items and sold her first piece on Opensea. When Foundation first launched, Camibus struggled to get an invite and minted her first piece on March 6th. She had already sold three NFTs by the time the gallery opened.
But Camibus didn’t have a style when she first started selling NFTs. The NFT newbie mostly drew cute cartoonish art, but she always felt like people didn’t take her seriously with it.
The only thing she had to decide on was the style because it was important for her to create something distinct and recognizable.
She wanted to experiment with a more contemplative, mature style. At last, she chose nude art. Why nudes though?? Because it’s what she’s exceptionally good at. She spent a decade perfecting her figure drawing technique.
The human body is both complex and elegant. It allows you to express a great deal of artistic beauty. You can use gesture, emotion, light, and color to your advantage.
“From Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, the human figure has been the most popular subject in art. We enjoy looking at the human form, and I enjoy painting it,” Camibus explains.
Why surrealism? Well, Camibus has been a fan of iconic Salvador Dali since she was a child, and his work has always fascinated her.
“I wanted my art to be inspired by his legacy but I didn’t want it to be an imitation,” she notes.
Surreal art appeals to her because Camibus believes it is the ultimate purpose of art to represent our strange dream-like thoughts.
But it was not an easy start for Camibus as she had to cross multiple hurdles to establish her artworks in the NFT space.
As a shy and introverted individual, Camibus didn’t spend much time on social media. Promoting her work on Twitter and attempting to gain visibility for it was extremely difficult at first.
“It didn’t come naturally to me, and I had no idea how to interact with others or present myself. I was so self-conscious about it,” Camibus reckons.
She didn’t give up and continued learning as the NFT space matured. Now Camibus can happily say she is almost at ease on social media right now.
From then on Camibus have been unstoppable, establishing her own brand in the NFT space
Notable NFT Artworks
Let’s go through some of the momentous NFTs crafted by Camibus!!
Temptation
“This is the piece where inspiration hit me.”
Camibus finds Temptation NFT as her most favorite artwork or the one that means most to her.
It’s the piece that most reminds her of Dali, and it’s the work on which popular NFT artist Beeple complimented her.
The Temptation NFT was the work that inspired Camibus to give all of her characters elongated legs.
You can view her other NFT artworks in the Foundation marketplace!!
Experimental Expenditures
This NFT collection contains her first experiments in the NFT sphere. You can view her other works here in OpenSea.
Ξthereal
Ξthereal NFT is one of Camibus’s favorite artworks. Ξthereal is also her highest priced sale, and it has almost perfect execution, according to Camibus.
The character’s flesh, the lighting, the concept, and the composition, literally everything about the artwork screams masterpiece.
In this NFT the universe is depicted as a black canvas with stars and the moon on top. The piece was inspired by Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
The fabric of space-time, which replaces the theory of gravity as a force, is frequently depicted in this manner. Camibus took it a step further by making it more artistic, but this is where the idea came from.
CΞNSORΞD
CΞNSORΞD NFT collection was created following Camibus’s suspension from Twitter. Being censored for her art and fearing for her career was obviously a traumatic experience for Camibus.
The series is inspired by the three wise monkeys and is a criticism of Twitter for ignoring her appeals while allowing real adult content on their platform and banning artists for their artworks.
The three pieces in this collection, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, showcase the hypocrisy of censoring nudity in art and are dedicated to all the artist friends who speak up and always pour their truth into creations.
InAdΞQuAtΞ
Because of all the pink, people think InAdΞQuAtΞ NFT is an optimistic piece, but it isn’t. The pink is there to deceive you into believing that everything is fine when it is not.
The piece is about Camibus’s feelings of not fitting in and not knowing where she belongs. She tried to think of a way to depict that in a painting and looked for the clearest visual representation of why those girls aren’t where they should be.
In this NFT there is a girl with long legs in the background next to a normal chair she can’t possibly sit on, and a normal girl in the foreground next to a very tall chair she can’t possibly reach.
Each girl would fit perfectly in the other’s chair. It’s not the girls or the chairs that are the issue. It’s the fact that it’s not the right chair for them.
bΞcoming
With the bΞcoming NFT, Camibus wanted to take her art to the next level. Last year, she happened to watch My Octopus Teacher, and the story stayed with her.
She became awestruck by the octopuses and the alien intelligence that it possessed.
“I’m not sure where the human race is going, but if we ever develop the necessary technological advancements to improve our biology, as Yuval Noah Harrari hinted in Homo Deus, what might happen if we take a cue from our alien friends, the octopuses?” Camibus wonders.
In this piece, she makes no allusion to combining the two biological creatures. The woman’s head in the NFT doesn’t appear to be organic. She paraphrases NIN’s lyrics from The Becoming.
“I beat my machine It’s a part of me
It’s inside of me I’m stuck in this
dream It’s changing me I am
becoming”
This piece represents a new species of creature in Camibus’s work, establishing a new Universe, new mythology.
Motherhood
Someone very close to Camibus had an unwanted pregnancy, which made her reflect on how much a woman’s life changes once she becomes a mother.
“Our society tells us that it is the most beautiful thing in the world, and I don’t disagree, but we are so used to seeing it in that light that I wanted to show it in a different light,” Camibus believes.
If women didn’t reproduce in this way and only heard about beings growing into other beings, coming out of them, and then feeding on their bodies, that could be a sci-fi horror plot, according to Camibus.
Ridley Scott’s ‘Raised by Wolves’ series deftly tackles the subject and it inspired her to develop such an idea.
RΞSIST
Amid the rising crisis between Russia & Ukraine, the crypto community has joined hands to raise donations for the people suffering from this situation.
Just a day ago, the UkraineDAO, the largest NFT-based crypto contribution to Ukraine’s war efforts, raised more than $6 million by auctioning a Ukraine flag NFT.
Camibus also launched a charity auction for Ukraine where she dropped the RΞSIST NFT with 100% of the proceeds going to the charity to help Ukraine.
The human body in this NFT is not distorted, the legs are not elongated, unlike Camibus’s signature artworks. “The character looks like us, IS like us: just a simple girl fighting for her country.”
In a symbolic sense, the red fabric represents blood. Camibus subtly incorporated Romania’s flag to show her home country Romania’s support for Ukraine. The Romanian flag is made up of the red canvas, which represents blood, and the Ukrainian flag.
The hole in the girl’s chest represents death, but she is still holding her flag. She is not running, but rather proudly standing up to the attack, bear-handed and without weapons.
Camibus is here giving people hope and support through her artworks, in a way inspiring other artists in the platform to do the same.
You can see her other artworks here on the SuperRare platform.
SuperRare is also honoring Camibus and her works for this International Women’s Day affirming her impact on this scene.
Camibus happened to share some more interesting nuggets of wisdom about her artwork, fangirl moments, and so on during an exclusive interview with The Crypto Times. So let’s take a look at that!!
Is there any message you are trying to convey through your art pieces?
I’m trying to talk about the female condition: what it means to, what it feels like and what’s expected from women in today’s society. I use a lot of symbolism in my work.
The most striking thing about my art is probably the dalinian long legs. They represent the dualism between how strong and weak we are at the same time – a contradictory thought but one that describes us so accurately.
Let’s take stilettos: it’s incredibly hard to keep your balance, they hurt, they’re uncomfortable but yet women do it to be beautiful, and they do it with so much grace they seem to defy the laws of gravity.
My pointy, needle-like legs are inspired by that. You may ask why some of my characters have geometric shaped holes on their wombs.
It’s geometric because it’s an abstraction, an idea, not a literal organic opening. This too represents the female condition.
Even in today’s society a woman’s reason for being is to reproduce. Her dreams and goals come second to that, and her entire identity is tied to the concept of motherhood.
My art tries to present a different perspective to this and maybe bring a bit more empathy to our struggles.
Do you have any female NFT artists with whom you’d like to collaborate? Who are you a big fan of?
I haven’t collaborated with anyone on a piece so far. I like to do everything myself and hate to delegate, but evolving is all about learning and adapting and being open to new experiences so I’m not saying I’ll never do it.
I’m a big fan of Zhuk – she also paints nudes and she’s incredibly talented. I really love Idil Dursun’s sci-fi cityscapes and Anna Lang’s beautifully executed illustrations.
I’m also a fan of Nude Yoga Girl and how she uses nudity in such a sincere, vulnerable manner. I have been inspired by her since 2015 and it may have been what inspired me to start painting nudes.
Any message or you would like to share on Women’s day to the upcoming and underrated female artists in the industry?
“Yes. One year ago, I was also an upcoming and underrated female artist. I had no connections, no experience, I was shy, I had nothing but my passion for art and a ton of ambition.
When I was growing up I didn’t have someone to look up to, someone to inspire me and let me know that I too can be an artist, but I hope I can be that person for others.”
“I know luck plays a role and maybe I was lucky, but luck is when opportunity meets preparedness and ladies, we’ve got a ton of opportunity here! All that’s left to do is show up and give it your best!!”
Also Read: Ayla El-Moussa’s Extravagant Fusion of Geometry, History and Mythical Imagination
