We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Matt Semke. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Matt below.

Matt, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

In 2006 I started posting new artwork daily to my website catswilleatyou.com. My original intention was to have a site where there was always new content and give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. I didn’t intend to set any records with a crazy art marathon, but over the course of the first year it really transformed my own approach to art and then also I saw my skills improving. I kept going. Now it’s been over 17 years of doing this, it’s the longest daily art publishing streak of any artist. Right now is consecutive day 6,255. I have filled my house with art, as well as many hard drives. I’ve had art and shortfilms exhibited and collected all around the world. I can’t imagine ever stopping.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m Matt Semke but many people know me by my online moniker of catswilleatyou. I’m an extremely prolific artist from Minnesota. Most of my work is digital, but I bring an attachment of traditional techniques with me into the emerging tech space. I spend time almost daily creating work in VR. I love VR painting simulators. Right now there’s a handful of software companies designing these programs and a pretty small community of artists using them. It’s been amazing to me because I can directly work with the software designers and give feedback and see my suggestions implemented. It’s a huge advantage to being an early adopter of this tech. I also share process videos/headset captures so that people can start to see how my artwork comes together from my perspective. Since there’s not many artists sharing work in this way, the content tends to track well on social media. Augmented Reality is another area I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the last few years. It’s such a valuable way to add layers on top of static work and also add interactivity to the work. This has become my favorite way to show off animation, now I can display one frame (or cell) of animation and the viewer can bring the whole piece to life when they view it with AR. I like to bring all of this tech together and build metaverse spaces. The metaverse was a big buzzword a couple years ago, and it eventually became cringe but I believe the best is yet to come there and I see a huge future for it. I’ve built spaces where my VR paintings can be viewed and you can jump in and hold discussions around the work with other people. I feel like a large amount of digital work is just living on websites but this is a creative way to make that experience so much more.

Alright – so here’s a fun one. What do you think about NFTs?

In short, I love NFTs.

I can absolutely also acknowledge the fact that hype around NFTs led to things getting completely out of hand a couple years ago. There’s definitely a scammy underbelly to it, which is natural in any ecosystem where there’s money to be made, but there’s also beautiful thriving communities of people focused on the art and the tech.

And I love the tech. It’s been huge for digital artists to have a method to have provable ownership of their work. Also it connects artists with an audience that wants to support them. I’ve always sold my NFTs at fair prices and I’ve made life long friends thanks to this technology. It hasn’t made me enormous amounts of money but it’s been a significant boost over selling my physical work in the traditional ways.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Just knowing I’ve got the longest streak going keeps me very motivated. 11 years ago, we had just had our first child, and as we were in the hospital I was debating to myself if I would keep my daily art streak going. Having some idea of how parenting was about to change my life, I wasn’t sure it would be possible to keep going. I started searching the web for other artists that were also doing dailies online. It was then that I discovered Beeple (Mike Winkelmann)… He wasn’t super famous at that time but he had some momentum going and had built a community of 3D bros that were all doing this daily challenge to get better at 3D. It was motivating to see that it was paying off for him and his popularity was growing, and his chops were getting better. I was 135 days ahead of him, he started in may of 2017, and I started in december of 2016. His was the longest streak I could find. In that moment, knowing I had the lead with my daily art streak, I decided I had to keep going. Watching his rise to superstardom over the last decade has just been added wind in my sails. But we’ve actually never met, and our art approaches are very different.

Also I’m still seeing my craft improve as a result of releasing daily work. That is another huge motivator for me. If I look back just a couple years I can see that all of this “practice” is making me a better artist.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.catswilleatyou.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/catswilleatyou_art
• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/catswilleatyou
• Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@catswilleatyou

Image Credits
All photos by catswilleatyou.