About The Gallery

Artist | Naturalist | estero Resident

Hello! My name is Bud and I’m an artist living in beautiful Estero, Florida. I left the corporate world years ago to add value to people and nature. I started as a photographer and am now fully immersed with digital art (which are often iterations of my photography, but not always). I got on the NFT trend way back in the early days (this is a joke – NFT’s have only been around for 6 or 7 years). I sell numbered and signed prints of my work when I own the NFT. When the limited edition has sold out, I sell the NFT and no longer own the property.

SO WHAT IS AN NFT (Non-Fungible Token)?

This is a simple question with a complex answer. While I won’t get into the details of Ethereum or blockchain in general, I think I can make the basics understandable. Here it goes…

Have you ever thought about the history of art created in the past? I’m not talking about art history – instead the history of an individual work of art. With rare exceptions, an old piece of art can’t be tracked from its first sale. This has historically created several problems including fake art, stolen art, copied art, etc. What if there were a way to track a piece of art from it’s beginning? What if there was a way to verify ownership at every step since the creation of the piece? And what if there were millions of copies (or at least hundreds of thousands of copies) of that record that anybody could see at any time? Those are the questions and problems that NFT’s resolve.

When I ‘mint’ an NFT, I store the code for the work of art on a blockchain platform. In other words, the information I create is stored in a similar way that music is stored on a vinyl record (thus begins the analogy – think of an NFT as a vinyl record). That vinyl record is stored on the internet where anybody can see it. Other people can’t play the music – they can just see the record as if it was sitting on a shelf. On the label of that record, there is a note that says, ‘This record is owned by Bud.’ Since I own it, I can play the music, copy and sell the music, let my friends listen to the music, or even destroy the record if I want to. Whenever I want to do so, I can sell the record to whomever I want. I can still see it exists (I can even see that I used to own it), but I can’t listen to the music anymore. The new owner can play the music, copy and sell the music, let his friends listen to it, etc. They take a pen, scratch out ‘This record is owned by Bud’ and write down ‘This record used to be owned by Bud, but is now owned by Mary.’ This goes on and on forever. Now you hopefully have an understanding of the NFT. They solve a lot of problems.

Are NFT’s valuable? Like anything, they are worth what the market will pay for them. A 40-year old guy named Mike Winkelmann from Wisconsin sold a NFT for $69 million dollars in 2021. That is the record. Mike is an unbelievable artist – I love his work and obviously many others do as well. He also holds the 3rd highest ever sale – it was a measly $28.9 million.

I do believe that NFT’s minted today will be like old coins in the shop down the road. In 25 years they will have a collectible value that increases beyond their intrinsic value. I actually create a lot of works and never monetize them – I just mint the NFT’s and plan to give them to my kids someday.

Finally, when I do a commission it comes with a minted NFT of the work. The price is higher, but understand I am selling all of the opportunity to profit from either the work or the NFT to the kind person who hires me.