“fishing day with daughter” (image credit: kutukola)
1/1: Please introduce yourself.
kutukola: Hello, I am kutukola, which means “Coke can” in Turkish. I’ve been drinking one can of cola every day since birth. It’s a habit that makes me look at life more cheerfully, but I don’t look that cheerful because it damages my teeth.
I was born in Antalya in 1994, and I’m still living here.
1/1: What art have you been working on lately?
kutukola: I don’t consider the images I create in 15-20 minutes every day as art or work. For me, working means focusing on things with more continuity, where more thought is put into the creation phase. I studied Art History, but painting is the branch of art that started for me with NFTs—I didn’t have any visual creation experience before that. However, I’ve been interested in music since my childhood. I think the answer to this question could be the music I’ve recorded and uploaded to the internet. If you want to listen to it, you can search for Kutu Kola on Spotify.
1/1: Can you describe your workspace and how it influences your art?
kutukola: Since my roommate and I live in a small house, our shared workspace is in the living room. We try to create a working environment where we watch television together, examine each other’s production processes in a social way, and sometimes discuss them. But we have to leave this lovely little house in November because our landlord said she will increase our rent by three times. For this reason, I think we will have to return to our family homes again.
“texas” (image credit: kutukola)
1/1: What tools do you use? Do you work with any special devices or tools unique to your creative process?
kutukola: In this drawing journey that I started with NFTs three years ago, I began with a computer mouse. However, a friend gave me a Wacom tablet she wasn’t using, and I started drawing some things on Sketchbook and Paint. Then, from the videos I watched on the YouTube account of my talented friend “Ed Marola,” whom you all know, I came across videos where he used an application called Aseprite and explained it in an instructive way. I realized that I now enjoy my drawings even more.
The best thing about Aseprite is that you can create your own brush from any image you want, and thanks to this program, I can encounter new coincidences in randomness, shape those shapeless patterns in my head, and produce them much faster. I remember the excitement that pixel art created in me like it was yesterday.
“beyond threshold” (image credit: kutukola)
1/1: What appeals to you about the medium of digital painting?
kutukola: There are many people in this digital painting community that I feel like I’m friends with, even though we’ve never met. It’s very fun for me to see people’s posts every day, observe their worlds in squares and rectangles, and make new inferences that I can adapt to my own art. I don’t know anything beyond what I can do, and I’m open to anything you can teach me. Everything feels new to me, and it makes me laugh to think that I want to be the most productive slacker in this community.
1/1: How would you describe your aesthetic?
kutukola: I think my aesthetic is the result of an eclectic mix that emerged from the games I played, the landscapes created in 30 minutes by Bob Ross that I watched as a child, my own adaptation of the drawings I see on the internet every day, and the seven-year effort to graduate from the art history faculty.
I think my aesthetic is just a creation that is the result of the eclectic mix that emerged from the games I played, the landscapes created in 30 minutes by Bob Ross that I watched as a child, and my own adaptation of the drawings I see on the internet every day, as well as the 7-year effort to graduate from art history faculty.
“all I have to do is put my feet in the water to cool off.” (image credit: kutukola)
1/1: How do you approach developing an idea into a finished piece? Can you walk us through your workflow?
kutukola: The landscape paintings I create are the result of my own adaptation of the random, irregularly scribbled patterns that I had the most fun making, which were created thanks to Aseprite. Sometimes I like to make drawings with stories, and these drawings generally consist of a process where I try to turn situations into jokes about how we, as humans, try to keep our complexes more secret.
I realized that these story-driven designs were influenced by my job as a bicycle courier, where I earned money to manage my life every day and had the opportunity to observe people while on the bike and reflect more on myself. It was really good for me to feel that I could be more honest with myself with each passing day.
1/1: Can you describe a typical day in your artistic practice, including any rituals or habits?
kutukola: It’s obvious that everything I’ve done and uploaded to the internet since the beginning is practical. It’s true that I make my daily drawings not out of habit, but to earn a few dollars a day and cover some of my habits, like buying beer and cigarettes. :)
“rice swamp” (image credit: kutukola)
1/1: How do you feel about the impact of generative AI on the creative process? Do you have a favorite AI tool?
kutukola: It’s a really fun process for artificial intelligence to convert the text we present to it into visuals and videos in just a few seconds. Even though I was interested in artificial intelligence for a while through DALL-E 3, it eventually turned into a process where I created visuals of the same text over and over again. I realized that I didn’t feel the excitement necessary to advance myself as an artificial intelligence artist.
1/1: Is there anything you consciously reject or struggle against in your work?
kutukola: Not really. Since I try to do everything I can, there’s absolutely nothing I avoid doing.
1/1: Are there any specific works of art (music, literature, film, etc.) that inspire or have significant meaning to you in your artistic practice?
“small pool” (image credit: kutukola)
kutukola: I am a big Lord of the Rings fan, and as I mentioned before, Bob Ross landscapes and the computer games I play have an impact on my drawings.
1/1: How do you come up with titles for your work?
kutukola: Sometimes the situation the character I create is in, what they want to express through facial expressions, the natural events in my landscape designs, and the irregularity of buildings and ruins are enough to inspire a title in my mind. I don’t think about it too much, and sometimes I just write the first thing that comes to mind, regardless of the visual.
1/1: For someone just getting into NFTs, what advice would you offer?
kutukola: Just do whatever you want.
1/1: Do you have a view on the creator royalties debate?
kutukola: I didn’t know what this meant—I uploaded a few pieces to Objkt and later uploaded the same images to Zora, and a friend warned me about it. I guess I learned that I shouldn’t do this. :)
“main street” (image credit: kutukola)
1/1: Any particular preference in terms of chains and marketplaces?
kutukola: I have preferred Hic et Nunc and Objkt since the beginning, but in the last six months, I have uploaded many designs that I created mostly with artificial intelligence to Zora. However, after the last update, I will focus only on Objkt.
1/1: Who are some of your favorite artists in the NFT space?
kutukola:
• Terkarak
• Galina
1/1: What are you working on next?
kutukola: These days, I am writing short scenarios of a few minutes where we have absurd dialogues with random people we encounter in our daily lives. I want to make short cartoons by creating simple animations, voice-overs, and music. I have a dream of making a 10-episode cartoon in the next few years.
1/1: Could you show us some of your favorite work you’ve done and tell us what it means to you?
kutukola:
“Rainbow Gate” (image credit: kutukola)
Two people encounter each other in the passage connecting different times in the rainbow, within this drawing, by cutting and changing a part of the background from my previous painting called The Blond Prince. This was the first moment I realized that I could do different things with my own paintings.
“Receded Waters” (image credit: kutokola)
I spent my childhood in a mountain village with a population of 100, where there was a small stream near the house. As a result of the snow melting, there was a flood in the summer, and our adobe house collapsed from the overflow. After that, we had to stay in a one-room hut built by my grandfather from boards for a year. I guess this is my favorite landscape that I’ve created.
“First Burger” (image credit: kutokola)
And this is a drawing I created with Paint 3D. I drew this while thinking about the emergence of the hamburger in the 19th century and why it is such a popular food today. Since the hamburger is nothing more than meat put between bread, I wanted to depict the moment when a hunter-gatherer society showed it to their friends as the first food they made after encountering agriculture.
“Kututown” (image credit: kutukola)
And finally, I guess I can say that this is a landscape where I placed bridges, roads, buildings, stairs, rainbows, and a few characters among the random things I made last. I wish everyone a good day filled with good memories.