Color Profiles: Cat Russell

🌐therworlds and Other Things

Saturday afternoon during the 2022 NFL Wildcard Weekend, I had a conversation with Cat Russell about healthcare in America, collage art, 70’s porn mags, sobriety, advice for aspiring artists getting into NFTs, and his upcoming collection, Otherworlds.

What was your upbringing like?

So, I’m an only child. I was a military kid so I moved around a lot and then I lived in Columbus, Ohio for a dozen or so years until about a year and a half ago I moved out to the middle of nowhere in southeast Ohio right on the foothills of Appalachia.

Were you always an artist as a kid? Did you draw a lot?

I’ve always been one of those people who focus a lot better while I’m doodling. You probably remember those people in school that sit there and their teacher gets mad cause they’re just drawing all over the corners of each piece of paper. I was definitely that person. I’ve always enjoyed art and wanted to do more of it, but was not really a big fan of taking art classes because they would say, “Today you have to make this.” And that is very counterintuitive to me because today I don’t want to make that. Today I want to make something else.

What is your art background? How were you introduced to collage art and what was the moment that made you realize that you had a talent and passion for it?

I used to do a bit of tagging and I really liked making stencils and cutting those out and going with that genre of art, the sort of more street art. In high school, every kid thinks Dali was pretty cool, so that was my main influence growing up.

Collage art, I actually didn’t get into until January of 2021. When I was getting sober, I realized that I needed to do something with my free time cause you get an extra 4 hours a day that you never had before. I wanted to revisit art because I had all of these ideas for art projects that got pushed aside because of drinking. I initially sat down and started drawing, tried painting, and at the time I was still detoxing, so my hands were extremely shaky, nothing was coming good, nothing was coming out the way I wanted. I realized that I have all these ideas of how I pictured things, but I was unable to achieve them at the moment because I just couldn’t create it. So I started thinking, if I could cut out assets and find the right texture, find that in a magazine, cut it out, cut it to the shape I need it, and work in that realm instead. So that was how I got started in collage, it was more just using the material as my form of paint versus using assets like cut-outs of people or boats or things. I was just cutting out colors and textures.

What was your career before becoming a full-time artist?

I’m an attorney and I did end-of-life healthcare compliance, so I ran an end-of-life healthcare agency for about seven years and I oversaw 175 or so annual patients and about a 100 employees and managed all their Medicare compliance and insurance denial appeals.

In this field you must have worked really closely with patients and their families. How has that experience played a role in how you view the world and your art?

My experience was very trying long-term. You can only see so many deaths before you become numb to them, before people become numbers on a screen, whether you want that or not. Until that psych patient that used to call you every night cussing you out and you wake up one morning and you find out he died and you feel a sense of relief. And all of those things aren’t healthy for the human psyche. I probably went through about 250 patients passing during my tenure there and it wears you down.

Can you share a patient’s story that has really affected you?

This story has happened twice actually, sadly. And both times were just infuriating. In both instances what occurred was the patient was on oxygen 24 hours a day. The patient had to get hospitalized for some reason, they get taken to a hospital in an ambulance, arrive at the hospital, they do all their hospital things, and they get discharged. However, while they get ready to get discharged, their insurance denies oxygen for the ambulance ride home and the insurance agency doesn’t tell me so I don’t fight it and create an appeal. And even if they did, appeals usually take about 24 hours, even if rushed. So they attempt to go home in the ambulance without oxygen and then die during the ambulance ride home because their insurance company denied their oxygen.

With your history working in public healthcare, if there was one thing you could do to improve healthcare in America, what would you do?

Healthcare in America is a mess. The general way I like to frame it is you’re either on Medicaid or your private insurance eats away all your money and you become on Medicaid. That is how end-of-life healthcare works in the US for 90% of people. I had a cancer patient and their bills were totaling about $120,000 a month. As well as you can plan your life, nobody is planning to have that level of bills come in and then be fighting cancer and living through it. Those bills, they probably could have been fought down to about $30,000 to $40,000 a month, but even then that’s a huge burden and at the same time you’re dealing with cancer, you’re trying to see your family while you still can, so at a certain point, you just give up on the bills. And can you blame them? If you told me that I had six months left to live, would I care that the bills were stacking up? So people let them stack up, they let them default, they don’t appeal them, even if it’s a bill that is obviously false and should be appealed. And say they have a good change in their prognosis, say they were given six months and now given four years. Well, they have four years to live now, but they are $800,000 in debt. And that is something that is insane to me about our system. The average human, until they have witnessed it day-in and day-out, can’t comprehend how rotten it is at the core in that regard.

What were some of your biggest inspirations growing up?

One thing that I always enjoyed in film were some of the more absurdist film techniques that were used. I liked Eraserhead a lot growing up. That was a movie that really fascinated me. I really liked the special effects used in 80’s horror movies, like think of “The Thing.” Reading about the makings of those films is extremely interesting to me and just the ways they were creating those effects before CGI. Sometimes I hear people say, “What would you do if you suddenly had ten million dollars,” and one of the things that I would do is start trying to do cool art in that type of medium. Making weird, strange, old special effects the way they used to back in the day. Those really have always captured me and fascinated me.

There’s a story about while they were filming “The Thing,” they had scenes where they had all of these tentacles flailing around and all the actors had to act in reverse because the tentacles were made out of tubing. So they had the tentacles strung all the way out and then had to pull them back in while all the actors act in reverse. Then they flip the video around so the final shot looks like these tentacles are flailing out. Just the workarounds they had to create because they didn’t have the technology we have today were really interesting to me.

You seem to have an affinity toward vintage things in your interests and your art. Can you touch more on that and why that is?

I think there is something uniquely beautiful about when people have to work within certain limitations. It’s very easy nowadays for any movie to be like, “Oh yeah, there will be a bunch of explosions and we’ll have an alien that rolls in,” all of those things. But once you take a project that has to work around certain confines and limitations whether they be budget-based or materials on hand, I think that often produces really unique things. So I’ve always liked that regardless of the medium, whether it be film, music, art. Just people taking what they have and exceeding everybody else’s expectations is something that inspires me.

You recently posted on Twitter of a very intricate cut-out of a bird’s nest that took over 5 hours to complete. , do you enter a sort of meditative state while creating?

As far as flow states go, it really depends on the type of piece. I try to, but with collage it’s a little bit more difficult than other mediums because of the extra steps in the process. For example, when you’re drawing, it’s often easier to get into a flow state, especially if you’re doodling, because you can sit there and let your mind wander while you’re creating and the hand just does its thing almost like magic. But with collage there’s that step of, “Okay, now I need this piece.” I have to then go find that piece of paper, cut it to match, and then angle it up and glue it. So because of all of those extra steps, getting into a flow is harder.

With more intricate cuts, for example if I’m doing a piece with three or four hundred cuts, I do take steps to try to maximize the chance of getting into flow. I’ll lay out all the papers I think I’m going to need in advance, cut out the major assets to the shapes I think I’ll need before I start working on a background that would need a hundred pieces of little paper. That way, I could have everything ready to go so I don’t have those hiccups along the way, but it is a much bigger challenge with collage art to hit that flow state.

However, there is something very cathartic to me about the process of cutting. That’s where I could hit a flow state of just sitting there and enjoying doing it and not really thinking at all. The mind can go blank, so I do very much enjoy that side and process of it.

How do you think assets look different inside a publication as a whole vs. after being cut out?

When viewing assets in a publication as a whole, everything around it factors into your vision of what it looks like, for better and for worse. A color sitting next to another color is very hard to identify what that color is. You may remember there was that viral post about the Gold and White or Black and Blue dress. If you were to take that picture of the dress and cut out one of the colors and just set that color there by itself, I don’t think anybody would question if that color is gold or blue. It’s because of everything that’s sitting around it, your brain tries to rationalize what that color is and gets it wrong or doesn’t get it 100% correct. That’s why cutting something out is a necessary step to know whether or not you even want to use it. There are pieces that I’ve cut out where I thought, “That face looks perfect, I should cut it out.” And as soon as I take it out, it just looks really devoid of the value it had sitting around the larger piece that it was in. On the other hand, there are things that I can see, especially now, where I might notice that this is a really ugly picture, but this one tree in it looks awesome. I bet if I cut this tree out of this ugly picture, that tree would look like a masterpiece once it’s sitting on its own.

What are some of your favorite publications and the time period of publications to cut out of and why?

I really like more vintage pieces. When I was in New York for NFT NYC 2021, I went out to this old used bookstore and I was buying books from the early 1900’s, late 1800’s. And there was one book that I found that didn’t even have real images in it, but the paper was from the 1880’s. And you know how the first page of the book is sometimes blank? I felt like I had to own that piece of paper. It looks so unique and you couldn’t recreate this piece of paper. It has this near coffee stain look to it of fading and random splotches where it had been left open one day for 3 hours in the sun and the sun hits it from a certain angle and all of that combined for over a hundred years. I like that about older assets where they have this wear-and-tear to them that you can’t just recreate. You can’t just go to the store right now and buy this month’s National Geographic and get all of those details of time pushed into the work itself. Also, I really like in 1930’s National Geographic’s, the color photos, I’m not sure if they’re color photos or if they added the color after the black and white, but there is something about the color to them that has an extra vibrancy, yet really grittiness to them that you just don’t see in photography nowadays.

I also like buying old porn magazines from the 70’s, 80’s. I think that they’re really interesting to look through because the ads in them are from a different time period. That’s the only way to describe it. I also think, Playboy in particular, has a lot more “prudeousness” to them than I had expected. I had heard before that they have a lot more articles and there’s not much nudity, but it really is true. It’s not like what you think of when you think of a porno mag.

If I could ever find them, the 1940’s “art” magazines, which were basically pornos from that time period. They were basically magazines for men to practice sketching nudes with all these women on a poster-style page in various poses. And the whole time they try to pretend like “You bought this magazine to draw this lady,” and then they’ll occasionally have a page where it’s “These were last month’s submissions from our readers,” and all the drawings are terrible. You can tell it’s a bunch of dudes who were buying these because it’s porn and it’s the 1940’s. And then maybe one of them got caught by his wife and was like, “No, no, I’m trying to sketch this. I’m going to submit this, I swear,” and draws this out of aspect monster. And they printed anyway.

To digitize your pieces into NFTs, you take photographs of your pieces instead of scanning them. Can you speak on why you decided to do that?

I did play around with a scanner when I first started and the scanner encaptured what the physical piece looked like probably the best. I don’t really have any doubt about that. With that said, it comes down to what you want from the NFT that you’re creating. I like the fact that I could create a piece and then photo it in the sun or shade, photo it with some light shined on it to get a little bit more mood that matches what I was going for and accent that. If you’ve ever gone shopping for paint, you may find the perfect color of purple and think it would look great on a wall. But when you buy it and paint it on the wall, under your lights you realize that it’s not really the same purple that you saw in the store. Just the light effect changes how you view that color. I think about that and I think that that’s a good analogy to why I photo instead of scan. I can choose what room that paint is in, I could choose what lights are shining on that paint and I could make sure that you the viewer get to view it in the correct context.

What does your daily work flow look like?

My workflow typically is broken down into two sections: the creation of the idea for a piece and the creation of the piece. The reason I have it broken down in that manner is because if you’re working on something every day, no matter how much you love it, some days it’s going to be work. And some days you just don’t want to go to work, but you go to work anyway. So the goal is to ensure that those days that I don’t feel like working on an Otherworlds piece, I can re-inspire myself and do it. I don’t have to sit there and wonder what I am going to make. I can look at my notepad full of themes and ideas I have written down and sketches with little stick figures of how it will look and work on those.

So usually at night, I spend half an hour to an hour jotting down ideas in this notepad sketching them out. So that way, I always have five or six that are just sitting in reserves. So on a good day and I wake up feeling inspired, I don’t really need to hit the notepad. I can just start working. I can go off the inspirations I’ve had. One day I wake up and it’s rainy, overcast, everything’s awful. That day I can hit the notepad and still say I had this really good idea. I can still make that.

As you’re gluing down assets, do you ever put secret Easter eggs for yourself that’s hidden, but you know that it’s there because you created it?

I created a piece one time where the purchaser of it got mailed the physical piece. The piece was an altar with a creature on it and inside the creature, I taped up a private seed phrase and I minted that as an NFT. So the only way to get this NFT is to rip open and destroy the piece and pull out that private key. And then you can now have the NFT instead. I think that’s the biggest Easter egg type thing I’ve done.

Creating a different piece every day for Otherworlds, have you ever dealt with any artist’s block? If no, why? If yes, how did you get past it?

I did during the first month. There’d be days where I get artist’s block and some of the pieces that have come out of that, honestly suck. They’re not going to be used in the project, but that’s part of it. That’s part of doing dailies. There’s an artist named Jrrdan that does NFTs that has been doing dailies for forever. I was hanging out with him in New York and asked him, “How long have you done dailies for?” And he says, “I don’t know. I think I’m on №900.” And I was like, “You realize that’s two and a half years, right? Every day, two and a half years.” And he’s like, “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” If you asked him if he had artist’s block, I think he would just say no at this point. And I’m kind of, almost, at the same level now where I just do it every day and it’s become a habit. When I used to drink, I drank every day. It’s habit.

How did you arrive at the name, Otherworlds?

Well, that name came later. The name actually came after I started working with Chasm, and a lot of that had to do with just what these are. Initially we were talking about Glimpses as one potential name because I viewed them as a snapshot of an existence. A moment in time for whatever creature or person is being shown. I didn’t necessarily want them to be event focused, but a little preview of somebody or something living their average existence. It’s just not our average existences. And we ended up deciding that the focus of that should be on the fact that it’s not our existence, they’re existences in Otherworlds versus a focus on the fact that they’re just glimpses of moments in time.

I got the privilege to view some of your pieces before you officially unveiled them and am truly blown away at the work. I picked a few of my favorites. Could you talk a little bit about the meaning behind the piece? The two that I wanted to focus on were My Mind the Tinder, My Body the Fire, My World the Forest and What If I Only Used Black?

For the first, one of the ideas behind it was this idea of “what is self.” And when we ask, what is self and what is reality, there’s a few different ways to look at it. There’s the idea that you are your thoughts and your emotions, and everything that is in your head is what creates you. In some ways, that’s correct. But in other ways it seems false because I don’t know what Hoff is thinking right now. And at the end of the day, does that matter? What matters to me is the actions that Hoff does. Hoff could be thinking terrible things day in, day out. But if all he does is good things in the world, what person is he? Is he a good person or a bad person? And that was the idea. Are we our mind or we are our actions, and which of those is really what we are in this world?

And What If I Only Used Black?

So that piece was focused on that exact question of what if I only used black to make a piece of art? Every piece of paper used is the color black, with one exception to that piece. The reason they don’t all look black, though, is because they’re taken from different sources. So what is black in a comic book is not the same black used in a 1800’s book versus a very glossy brand new magazine you would buy at the store today. All of those things in the context of their magazine or book is the color black, but when you cut them all out, they all look different and have different shades to them. So I did that to try and build a whole Otherworlds piece based on just using the color black and trying to still create all the variation within it. The one exception to it is the veil around the person. I used this photo from the bombing at Hiroshima of a woman who was laying dead. It’s a very interesting book that I use and I use it quite often because I really like just how impactful all the photography is. And overall, that photograph in particular somehow still seemed to speak to this theme of What if I Only Use Black?

What plans do you have for all the physical pieces?

So, I can say the physical pieces do have plans. I don’t really want to speak on that yet, though, because that plan shouldn’t be really unveiled until after the collection drops or around that time. So I can’t fully answer your question other than saying, I’m making them all the same size and I have a reason behind that and there’s plans around what to do with these. If I was to make one hundred physical pieces and then not have plans for them, that seems very counterintuitive of the very nature of having traditional art built into the NFT system.

Does every Otherworlds piece have a deep message behind it?

When I first started making these, a lot of them were very focused on questions of “What if I only black?” or “What if I just do this for a piece?” And now it gets a lot more varied within it. Some days I’m okay with just making a piece that is just very aesthetically appealing. I don’t think every piece of art needs to be deep on certain levels. And I like the fact that this project allows me to vary between making one that is really cool-looking for the sake of being cool and pieces where I’m trying to have a real conversation within them. And after this whole collection comes out, collectors can decide for themselves which types of pieces from it are what they want. I also think putting those two types of art together in one collection doesn’t necessarily juxtapose them.

What do you hope that people take away from this collection?

Well, the one hope is that it can be used as a springboard for people who otherwise wouldn’t start looking at NFTs, as art, to start looking into collecting one of one’s from other artists out there. There’s so many good artists that are making NFTs. There are so many artists better than me that I love and I see their art just go unnoticed and sitting while I watch other things sell like hotcakes. A great thing to occur as a result of this is people finding a renewed interest in buying one of one’s. We always see on Twitter, “one of one season’s coming” and it’s not coming. Unfortunately, it’s a very difficult thing for that to occur because it’s a much more different investing practice. You’re not going to get a quick flip of a one of one. So people need to buy them because they like them and the money needs to be secondary. So I’m hoping that a collection like this gives people a little bit more opportunity to explore just looking at art and asking themselves questions about it. Art has this nice way of allowing humans to ask questions of themselves that they can’t put into words. And I think it’s of value for people to just stare at art. Whether you’re right click saving art, whether you’re purchasing it, taking time and looking at it and thinking about what it means to you and then why it means that does add value to a human.

“Whether you’re right click saving art, whether you’re purchasing it, taking time looking and thinking about what it means to you, and why it means that, does add value to a human.“

You once tweeted, “One major utility of my art is you can show it to someone and then based on their opinion of it, you can decide whether you like that person or not.” Do you believe that NFTs require a roadmap for success?

So I always think of the NFT world as two places: the art and the casino. Yeah, you want utility. It doesn’t need to be real utility because what those NFTs are a lot of times is they’re all coins. Back in 2017, my favorite altcoin to talk about and I still talk about was Dentacoin (DCN).

It was this altcoin where they wrote up a whole roadmap of how every dentist in the world was going to start using Dentacoin to accept payments. I don’t know why these dentists don’t just use Bitcoin if they’re going to use crypto, but for some reason, they’re going to want Dentacoin. And it’s this absurd roadmap, but that was the utility around this coin. And collectively, we all agreed for months that Dentacoin was going to go up. And it was that half joke where you all know it’s not, you all know it’s absurd. So for some NFTs, I think roadmap is good. Whether the roadmap is realistic or whether it’s just absurd like Dentacoin’s was, it gives a reason to talk about it and add more to the community than “Hey, did the number go up yet?” Like, make an absurd one. Why not? Like, let’s have fun with it.

For some NFT’s, roadmap is good. Art on the other hand, it’s art. You don’t need a roadmap. Picasso didn’t have a roadmap. You just don’t need one. So, yeah, I’ll joke about it all day long. I think there is no real roadmap to art. For Otherworlds, I’ll probably have some level of roadmap to it because it’s kind of that hybridization of the two: art meets collection in a digital NFT age. But the roadmap isn’t there to do anything except for what I’m planning on and what I want to do with it. It’s not a roadmap for profit, it’s not a roadmap for the numbers to go up. It’s a roadmap of, I made these things, I made these with this in mind, this is what I’m going to do, whether you like it or not.

Congratulations on being one year sober today. Do you feel like your art has saved what your addiction had put at risk?

The art was essential to hit the milestone. Idle hands are the devil’s plaything. Anybody in that same situation, whether they ended up choosing art, whether they end up choosing to become a huge sports fan, whatever it is, you need something to do. And this was what I chose. And I do think what I chose has become something that I’m able to invest in with the same level of interest that I used to have in drinking, which was quite a high level of interest. And I’m the type of person that gets addicted to things and goes all in. So yeah, art saved me.

It seems as though you broke your alcohol addiction really easily, but I’m sure that’s not the case. What were some of the hardest stages to get through?

Well you know, if you actually hit bottom, it makes it a lot easier to cut ties with something like that. And I did. A year ago yesterday, I tried to kill myself. You hit that point and you end up having to face a realization of, “Well, am I going to try again and succeed or am I going to make a major life change?

I understand that you’ve been hired by Blockparty as a community manager. What are some of the initiatives that you’re launching with Blockparty?

Yeah, it started about two weeks ago and I’ve worked closely with this marketplace for about a year now. Testing it out for them, listing stuff there, helping them identify bug fixes along the way, everything under the sun. I wanted to work with them. I like the people there. I like their mentality of build first, don’t work on the hype, just work on the product. So now that I’m here, I’ve been working on a couple initiatives. One is I want to start spotlighting one new artist and one existing artist on the platform every month. So when we find a new artist that is as excited about Blockparty as I am, I want to reward them by say, writing a blog post about them, hosting a Twitter Spaces and interviewing them, putting their art on the front page of the website. Any website can put Xcopy on the front page, but not a lot of the marketplaces just say, “Hey, we really like random Anon123’s art, that’s going on the front page.” And I want us to at least block in a certain amount of time for the front page to be focused on just people making cool art. Because it’s an art marketplace. That’s what it should be for.

At the same time for artists that have been on the platform, I want to make sure that we’re appreciating them. You don’t want that idea of like, “We highlighted you when you first got on and then we never talked to you again”. I want it to be, “Hey, this person minted a piece on the platform three months ago and it kind of went under the radar. Let’s re-highlight it and show it off.” And highlighting those things.

The other area is trying to build communities around a marketplace. So I like the idea that you take a certain medium like collage and say I told you to go buy a collage NFT. I don’t think you would know where to start. You would probably doomscrool on Twitter until you found a collage NFT that you liked because the search tools by medium on any marketplace aren’t there yet. And I want to start building around that idea of taking individual mediums and making Blockparty their home. So when people say, “I want to buy a collage,” they come to Blockparty. I’m going to make sure that I do everything in my power to work to help them do that. And then once we get all collage artists all on board on Blockparty, let’s look at another medium and do it again. If you asked, “Hey, where should I go to buy this?,” and you don’t have an answer, let’s find that medium, identify it and really build to make sure that the people that are in that medium are getting what they want out of a marketplace and can start calling one, in particular the location for that medium.

What advice would you give for any aspiring collage artists or artists in general entering the NFT space?

So if you’re a collage artist, just go into the collage community. We hold a spaces every Friday at 1 PM EST, we have a Telegram, we have a private Twitter group. That’s where to go for all of that. Even if you don’t want to do the NFT thing, come and join the conversation. It will only benefit you as an artist hearing other people tell you tips and tricks and answer questions and be honest with you about your work.

For artists in general, if you’re looking to enter the NFT space, what I would recommend is as soon as you start getting into the space, find somebody else doing the exact same thing as you around the same time as you. They should be your best friend because you’re both going to go through so many similar experiences, you’re both going to have people trying to scam you at the same time, you’re going to be living the same overall realities in so many ways. And so having that person to talk to and maybe even make a habit of talking to them a few times a week will help you a lot. For example, if they start hitting a real slump in their sales and their work is the same quality as yours, guess what? You better expect a slump coming in your sales, too. That’s probably the market. If they just got scammed, have them tell you what happened and why. That way, you both don’t get scammed. You will have at least this one person to fall back on so that when you post a new piece of art, it’s getting one retweet. If you have 100 followers on Twitter, getting one retweet matters. You might post art that gets zero retweets and that sucks and is embarrassing and it hurts your feelings. So find that person and workshop with each other. I think workshopping with other artists and having a conversation to talk for work, talk for growth, talk to better ourselves and better plan for our professional lives. That’s a great step forward to ensuring that you have success in the space.

At a certain point when you do end up deciding you want to be an artist full time, you do have to take a leap of faith. And you’re going to question it. Do things that can prepare you in advance. I set aside money in advance before I took this leap, so that I wouldn’t have to worry if my art sold every day to survive. Do yourself a favor and just do those things. If it requires you to work another month at the crappy dead-end job first to make that happen, do it. You’re looking for the long term. See the big picture and that’ll help ensure that you can enjoy your days and enjoying your days will help you make better art. Art isn’t about suffering. That’s such a stupid thing. For some people that may work best for them, but the idea of this starving, crappy existence of an artist in order to make good art, that’s not what you want. You can be happy and do what you enjoy.

You can follow Cat Russell on Twitter and buy his work here. Also, hop in his Discord to say hi.