Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to David Bernhardt. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

David, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

I believe I first knew that I wanted to work in a creative path when I was like 10. Of course back then, I didn’t know what that meant for me. I didn’t know what I wanted to create, but I always knew that I liked making things. At the time, the only job I knew of that made things and was cool was a blacksmith. I think that’s because I had just left a renaissance fair. I thought it was really cool that it was somebody’s job to play with fire and metal all day. I honestly had no idea what else was involved.

What initially drew me to creating digital art was whitewater canoeing. I started making GoPro videos so that I could share my experiences from the river with friends and family. Because of how complicated the movements and structures on the river are to describe verbally, it became a lot easier for me to just show them footage of what I was talking about. This eventually led to me learning about video editing because I wanted to show the highlights of what happened that weekend without all the flat water and boring bits in between.

And thus began my creative process. I started learning about video editing hitting my head against one problem at a time, one project at a time, while incrementally improving each time. Until one day I came across a project that was going to take 36 hours to render. At the time I just had my laptop that I used for my high school web design class. So, to prevent this problem from making my school day more difficult to navigate I started learning how to build computers. The idea being that even if the computer I was building wasn’t any better than my laptop, then rendering wouldn’t inhibit my schoolwork. I could leave the computer running at home for 36 hours while my video renders and go about my normal school week working on other things.

But sometimes my problems weren’t always on the screen or in the art. One of my biggest problems getting started in making videos and trying to be an artist, has been my art not being accepted by my family. I was raised by two parents with MBAs that majored in accounting for their BS degrees. So, the importance that I have continued to place in the creative process is very foreign to them. It wasn’t until I started seeing any sort of a paycheck (a tiny one at best) from my work in college that my parents even started to believe in me and my creative ventures. I often felt very discouraged by their lack of understanding. I felt like they always were looking for opportunities to discourage me from investing as much time as I was into improving my skills and making incremental improvements to the artwork I was producing. I never felt like giving up was an answer. All I knew was that I wanted to make things, and my art is the first clear avenue I’ve had to be able to do that.

David, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I got my first internships in video editing by just walking into Tennessee Technological University’s iCube and telling them that I edit photos and video. It’s infinitely easier to land a $10 an hour internship than to find a career in video editing or graphic design. Especially one with enough pay to cover rent, much less find one that comes with benefits. When the lockdowns first started in early 2020, my last video editing internship lost funding for my position. I’ve been looking for work in the field ever since, even with 3 years of on-the-job experience. Please hire me :) My main arena of expertise is digital imagery, and I work in multiple facets under each avenue. In video production, I have worked in writing, recording, live broadcasting, and editing. In graphic design, I work mostly freelance gigs making logos, banners, and twitch emotes. Recently, I have sold posters at a local brewery book fair event. Typically, when I’m working with photography, the photos are used as assets that I draw over. I do this to create more accurate proportions and to make the perspective of subjects within a scene make more visual sense. I also dabble in photo manipulation in photoshop.
I think what sets me apart in the creative field is the variety of formats that I use. I am interested in a variety of formats within the realm of digital imagery. I want to be a flexible creative professional. I have always wanted to be a useful and important member of a creative team that makes high quality works. I earned this skillset by working on projects alone and finding solutions to problems that I have encountered. I am incredibly proud of my adaptability as a creative, and it is my greatest asset. I have always wanted the expertise to handle any project. Not only do I strive to increase my skills, but I also obsess over improvement. I always work hard to attain higher levels of quality within my work. Whether that means mixing medias between two formats or trying to attach a meaning / story to that piece. I want so badly to create projects that makes me proud. I want to complete a project knowing that I produced the best artwork that I could.

Is there a mission driving your creative journey?

My biggest goal as an artist is to create things I can be proud of. I always want to continue improving. Whether that means I am trying to learn new skills, interact with new mediums or just continuing to make improvements in quality in the mediums I’m already active in. This is the most pertinent goal that I have I can chase after day after day hour after hour in my creative life.

I feel like there are some items on my bucket list like working on a movie set. Or making artwork that people hang up and appreciate and they enjoy the hard work and story behind that piece. All I want is for my work to be appreciated and to not starve while I’m pursuing my passions.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

In my opinion the best way we as individuals can support artists is by buying art directly from them. If the artist doesn’t have to split their money with a platform like PayPal or fiverr it will be easier for them to continue to create art. The fewer hands reaching into the pocket of your average artist the better. Art is already a very competitive field made only more desperate by people trying to become the middleman in the equation and take money out of their pockets before they can even consider re investing it into their creative ventures. Artists today also have to now compete with AI that churn out search bar prompt driven cheap renditions of popular characters in the style of famous artists. I do believe that this adversity will push innovation in creativity and a possibly new artistic movement. But I still find it disturbing that recently the field of art has been plagued by things that seek to cheapen and commodify art.
Things like NFTS where one character is made and then fed into a randomization algorithm that spits out 10,000 variations of the same character with different hats, shirts and different colored backgrounds make no sense. How could these 10,000 variations of the same character be worth thousands of dollars apiece? It makes no common sense. I would understand using that method of randomization if it was made into something transformative. But instead, it is just used to spit out 10,000 variations of the same thing and then used as trading cards between rich people. NFTs were never about the creativity behind these images. It was always about finding the next person dumb enough to spend $250,000 on a picture that they now “own.”
Since I started making portraits, I have always made them a fragment of my own personality. They relate to a story or experience that I’ve had in my life or some experimentation and example of me trying to expand my skill set. I feel like these randomized characters like Bored Ape Yacht Club characters or art pieces put together by AI are inherently less valuable because they have no human connection behind them. They’re very one-dimensional.
Please. Find an artist you like and support them directly. Want something new to hang on your wall? Commission them directly. That is the best way to support that artist that you love.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dbernhardtportfolio.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/canoesgallery/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-bernhardt-143780169/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/imthecanoe
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjpA6oSa-UcOrDCaNccKTVw

Image Credits
I created all of the Images used