imagination as an escape

welcome to issue #11 of moments, our bi-weekly newsletter. if you’re new here, this is the space where we share product updates, news from our community, and a curation of the best things we’re seeing online and offline.

this mother’s day we’re celebrating those in our community who are balancing their creative pursuits alongside family, whatever shape that may take :)

we’ve been busy working on a refreshed minting experience, wrapping our first-ever gallery show, and chatting with one of our favorite painters. let’s get into it.

we’re starting may off with a lot of new product launches around community, onboarding, and ways to connect with collectors 👀

what’s new?

• updated onboarding experience – when you join primitives, we now welcome you with a personalized list of moments to collect and creators to follow. invite a friend to experience it :)

• unlimited mints 💥 – want to grow your collector base more quickly? unlimited mints let anyone on primitives collect your work without making you approve each request manually. try it out and supercharge your creations.

icymi, we recently launched three new communities for photography, fine arts, and graphic design. you can collect these moments to unlocks dedicated chatrooms & opportunities to meet other creators

a few highlights from conversations happening in our creator communities this week: ellie pace shared more about mid-century photographer robert doisneaux’s influence on her work, drowning recommended malik roberts’s show at allouche gall, and we broke down the inspiration behind nehemiah’s los angeles photography.

our featured creator this week is nyc-based painter alex mamorsky (@amamsy). her work is at once whimsical, steeped with meaning, and reminiscent of dada symbolism. we sat down with alex to discuss her creative influences, how mental health and family intersect with her work, and the impact she hopes her art can have on the world.

tell us about yourself – when did you start painting?

i’m from new york. i grew up in westchester but came in and out of the city pretty often and i currently live in bedstuy. i started painting in the way that i am now in early 2020. technically pretty recently. i've been a creative, so to speak, my whole life, i think. i love making things and experimenting in regards to making art.

i've tried a lot of different things and what i’ve had the most success in is using acrylic based products on stretched canvas. i mostly use acrylic paints and inks and mix them with molding paste. i like things to be really textured which takes a lot of coats of paint, which is also why i steer away from oils.

what inspires you to do all of this?

well i started painting at a time when i was mentally not in a very good place. i struggled with depression and anxiety, off and on for a long time. being able to focus on those things and spend hours bringing them to life was a way for me to use my imagination to escape some of these darker feelings i had.

continuing to find little escapes into joy and ways to imagine things differently became a healing mechanism for me, and that was self-fueled inspiration.

people question how i think of the things i paint — they’ll ask me “what were you on when you did that?” and can't believe i'm fully sober thinking of my subjects. i have a younger sister, who's very important to me, and she's completely deaf. growing up, i constantly needed to create worlds, through playing or adjusting situations to think about how my sister could be a part of things and how she could best navigate being in certain places. i've always needed to use my imagination to find ways to have fun and to escape things that might be harder to face.

what does being a creator mean to you?

it’s about finding ways to express myself and share that with the world in a way that is accessible and makes people happy. i think creation is about providing brief moments that take you out of what you're thinking. i want the things that i create to be able to have that effect on people.

i have this vision of my painting hanging in someone's hallway, and if they're having a bad day, they look at it just for a split second and see something bright, funny, and kind of weird, and for that second, it takes them out of their anger. if i can do that, take people out of their funks, with my art, i feel like i will have successfully accomplished my mission.

have you had any prior experience with nfts?

not a ton. when i first started sharing my artwork in 2020, nfts took off. because of the style of my art, a lot of people told me i should turn them into nfts.

how did you feel about being on primitives for the first time?

once i was introduced to primitives i knew right off the bat that it was not going to be as hard as the other platforms. my mind was opened up quite a bit to what an nft could be.

the barrier to entry with primitives is so low. it's free and easy. i'm a lot more open to experimentation in terms of what i could put out there. primitives seems to be different, it makes the cognitive load of that whole process just a lot easier.

want to add one of alex’s moments to your collection? visit her profile and collect a moment below.

last week we hosted seen, our first pop-up gallery exhibit in nyc. we featured five artists from the primitives community: alex mamorsky, Lu<^, billie fabrikant, yekaterina gyadu, and zachary s. laine.

missed the event? not to worry :) you can read our full-recap here. each of the exhibit pieces are available in physical form as well as digital editions for purchase.

what else has been on our minds? the world’s most elegant websites, dip dip, drowning with a live orchestra, and a new way to look at the creative spectrum.