TWU: Artistic Redaction - an updated article

an article that should have been posted on mirror 890 days ago.

I’ve been an artist my entire life. When I was old enough to pick up my first crayon I began to draw. I’d draw any and everything ranging from horses to fish to people and of course, abstracts.

With the process, Artistic Redaction, a canvas’s empty corner is usually the starting point. It begins with a word or a phrase, something that means something to me or maybe an unwanted emotion. Maybe a feeling or a problem, an emotion I’d very much either like to hold on to or let go of, to release. Those are the phrases that become memorialized in collections like ‘ThisWaysUP’. As letters fill the canvas from corner to corner, overlap and criss-cross, shapes and swirls begin to emerge from the landscape of the canvas. Depth and corners of the geometric abstractions begin to move your eye from the start to the finish and maybe once over again. The colors, textures and shapes have to make me feel ‘something’. What once ‘read words’ now invokes feeling. My eye begins to push and pull from the page changing what once ‘read’ …now expresses itself in an exhausted emotion that can now pushed aside for something fresh and new.

“by morning I knew that I had started something meaningful”

This is the only way I know how to explain the process of ‘Artistic Redaction.’ What’s funny, is that I see other artists create using the process all the time, I have just given it a more ‘serious’ name. When I was younger and I’d get upset, I’d grab for any scratch of paper and artistically redact away. By the time I was finished I’d always feel something completely different.

TWU: “ThisWaysUP’ is a collection of 50 unique NFTs on the Ethereum Blockchain. I created the collection on a Manifold contract so I would have creative control of the collection. not Opensea or Foundation or any other centralized platform (some disrespect dished;). If the platforms go under or is hacked, your art is safe and sound in your wallet. It took me a bit longer to make sure that I taught myself the right way to create the tokens. It then took a bit longer to wait for extra permissions to be enabled, but it was worth the wait. TWU is not my genesis piece, but it is my first NFT collection and it was created in November of 2021. It’s been the collection that gave me a pretty extensive NFT education and along the way I’ve made some lifelong web3 friends. So for that I’m forever grateful. This collection was my gift back to those friends.

As a 1/1 artist of 25 years, a mom of twins, a wife and an entrepreneur I’d rather underpromise and overdeliver especially on the word we’ve all come to know and love — ‘utility’. This collection TWU will be that. The utility collection — the First50.

At the time this article was written Volume II had not been created. In conjunction with volume I, I airdropped another 50 personalized pfps with my art in the background. You have to remember, this was before the days of .50 cent airdrops or manifold claims. Manifold had just come out with their own personal creator contracts and TWU was one of them. Eth had just dropped from about $3800 (when I minted my contract) and to even create a series alone required manifold’s permission & their own special plug-ins (i am not a coder - i did try to create my own solidity contract). But it was worth it. Just to be able to airdrop the mfer community 100 nfts that i saw around the community for the next few weeks and even to this day, yeah, it was worth it. Many have become my dearest friends and some have collected my work, but in the end it was a successful and meaningful project to me.

As seen above each abstract piece has a counter token with a personalized pfp. Both tokens were airdropped to each person, a hundred tokens in total - Volume I & Volume II. There were 3 gift tokens minted on that particular contract to the three people that purchased their tokens. Other airdrops have been sent to many holders of the TWU collection since deployment.

• View TWU: Volume I: 1–50: foundation.app/collection/twu

• View TWU: Volume I: 1–50: & Volume 50-100 in custom built OnCyber Gallery: oncyber.io/galleryhaustwu

• please reach out at thompsonNFT@gmail.com or just message me on any socials if you have any questions at all