We were lucky to catch up with Michael Camarra recently and have shared our conversation below.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I work now as a creative director full time. I sort of happened into design and art direction to pay my bills. Fast forward to now and I’m a creative director. So that means a lot more responsibility, some weekend work etc.

After some years, I needed a creative outlet. Creative direction is heavy on direction, and light on creative sometimes. So starting about 5 years ago, I started to seriously pursue art again. I had originally finished school as an illustrator and moonlit as one on and off, but I was not making work regularly and often it would just be small illustration assignments.

I had a long conversation with an old illustration professor, at the outset and he encouraged me to get back into painting. I took his advice and started applying to open call competitions. I put a site together and researched galleries to submit my work to. From there I started showing in group shows then eventually my first three solo shows with Arch Enemy Arts in Philly.

The main challenge has been really balancing everything time-wise, along with raising a 3.5 year old. Time is the most valuable commodity and having a kid really put that into perspective.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on NFTs. (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I feel like this question comes up a lot, and it’s a heated debate. If artists start doing NFTs, there’s a lot negativity thrown at them, that I don’t think is justified at all. One thing that comes up is how it uses a lot of energy. But I think that’s sort of a cherry picked complaint. Think about all the energy and servers used for Tiktok, or Instagram, or video games.

I think it’s nice that there’s a way to make digital artists able to monetize their work a little more. My biggest struggle with the whole art NFT premise, is that it’s creating an artificial scarcity on something infinitely replicable. Now some NFTs give you like the full rights to own the copyright… in which case you’re buying an asset. And that makes total sense to me because you can, as the buyer, merchandise that image you bought. However the idea of spending a lot of money on NFTs is sort of crazy to me.

The speculative pricing and all of that in the NFT world is bananas to me, but it’s also nuts in the real life art world. People ascribe some huge value to what is essentially paint smeared on cloth with weasel fur. Pricing in art has always been a bit of a subjective thing. Also laundering money through art has always been a thing too. So I don’t think that’s at all unique to NFTs.

That all said, I think that there is a use in NFTs that accompany a real piece of art. The idea of an artist making money on resale of a piece is HUGE. Artists have gotten screwed through all of history, so that’s a great feature. There’s a lot of work that goes into making an NFT, and cultivating a following in that space. Having a lot of social clout to begin with helps a lot, because social following seems like the best way to appraise the value of an artist if you don’t really know a whole lot about art. But if you’re looking at numbers and such, on paper, that seems like a good way to approximate the value of a particular artist’s worth.

This might all seem like I’m looking down on NFTs, and I want to be clear that I’m not. There’s a lot to it that inherently doesn’t make any sense to me. There’s a lot about the art world that doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t have a huge social following, but if I had a following of like 40k, I would definitely be trying my hand at NFTs. I just don’t have that following that I could maybe draw a small portion from.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

The most rewarding aspect, is that there is someone out there who wants to my your work. That they want to look at it every day and put it up in their home. They want a relationship it.

The process involves so much prep for making art. Concepting it, re-concepting it, drawing it, getting reference, drawing again, prepping your surfaces, then painting it, finishing it, framing it and starting all over again for the next piece. There is so much time spent in the studio, then it goes to a gallery and is up on the wall for a month. If you’re lucky you can go to the gallery for the opening and there’s people who have come to see your work.

This was something Lane Twitchell told me when I was working as his assistant. He also came from an illustration background but he felt it was so anonymous. Illustrations are art for reproduction, and if someone throws out that Time Magazine cover you did, that’s just sort of the lifecycle of that medium. Whereas with fine art, you’re more celebrated. Though I think with the boundaries between artist and illustrator have been blurred lately, which is great. Fine art also happens to be the one profession that you can age into… older artists are these icons. At the time, I remember Lane saying all this but it didn’t resonate with me because I found the whole idea of making fine art so daunting. Where do you even begin, right?

But those words stuck with me and all these years later now that I’m in fine art, they really ring true. It might seem a little bit ego driven, but it’s so rewarding that people see and respond to my work. I appreciate everyone who follows me, interacts with me on Instagram, and buys my work. I try to respond to every comment or message.

Contact Info:

• Website: mdcamarra.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/mcamarra
• Facebook: @mdcamarra