Thursday Artist Feature: @juanmiguelsalas AKA Juan

NFT Showroom artist feature of Thursday is the multi-dimensional Juan Miguel Salas. He does everything from digital illustrations, to NSFW images, to his recently posted pop-art animation.

There's not much for me to add, because Juan was incredibly thorough in his answers to my questions. Check him out below:

Who is @juanmiguelsalas

I am from Cuba but I have lived in Germany for 13 years. I am 43 years old and work as a freelance videographer as well as doing motion and graphic design.

It's amazing how international the NFT art community is. Among three artists featured, we've had a Cuban in Germany, a Korean in Canada, a Nigerian, and if you count me, the writer, an American in Thailand.

How did you get started?

I have been creating art since I was a small child, especially painting and later, as a teenager, I began to experiment with all kinds of graphic arts, especially those made with a computer. But all this was more because I was passionate about art and not because I was thinking of becoming an artist. Later I worked as a graphic designer and studied cinema which is what I do as work. And yes, you can say that I make art all the time in my job, but it is the art of others, not mine. I have continued doing creative things in my free time for myself but .... only for myself until now with the arrival of the NFT.

Since you already brought it up, how do you feel about NFTs and the art world?

One of the things I like most about NFTs and their relationship to art is that a free art market has been created with no one in between. You make a piece and people buy it or not depending on whether they like it or not. For me, thinking about trying to sell the things that I did as a hobby, especially digital things, was a dream 10 years ago. The whole process that involved selling works of art went through galleries, curators and all that we know. And digital artwork? Impossible! And that's without thinking about the necessary fame. What the NFTs have done, from my point of view, has been to liberate the art market for the vast majority. On both sides, the buyers and the artists, something that was quite exclusive.

This hits home for me as someone who has participated (at a low level) in the traditional art world. Trying to get the attention of a gallery for a show, even if it's just a community show, is a full time job. Attending the opening, hawking your work, promoting yourself, it's everything involved with selling NFTs x2.

What inspires you?

Everything inspires me. I am always observing everything and I try to do it with freshness, as if I were a child. That makes you always see new things in places where you have already been. I am also one of those who try to return to where they went by another way in order to experience something new. I really like learning new things, which helps a lot with inspiration and versatility. That is why I do not have a defined style. I am always experimenting with new techniques or mixing styles and techniques that I already know to create new results.

The only theme that I can say that is recurrent in my work in general is the human being.

And that's something I think we can all relate to: being a human being.

There's not much for me to add, because Juan was incredibly thorough in his answers to my questions. Check him out below:

Where to find @juanmiguelsalas

NFT Showroom: https://nftshowroom.com/juanmiguelsalas/gallery
Instagram: @juanmiguelsalasrdguez
Twitter: @juanmiguelsalas