TokenEditions proudly welcomes the creative duo Frank Moth and their new NFT art drop “Hidden in Time”, a stunning collection that demonstrates their mastery of digital collage and their passion for exploring universal human concepts and emotions through art.
Frank Moth is the digital collage and graphic artist duo Eleftherios and Marianna. Based in Veria, Greece, they explore universal concepts of love, humility, truth, nostalgia and forgiveness, through colorful, surreal floral portraits and futuristic retro collages and compositions.
Their shared artistic journey began over 15 years ago when they began creating alongside their everyday professions. At this time, making art was a way for them to interpret both the positive and negative emotions and experiences they encountered throughout their lives. In 2014, their project evolved into their now well-known alias and brand, Frank Moth. They says that the creation of Frank Moth was also a way for them escape the hard and ephemeral present, transporting themselves via their art to what they characterize as a nostalgic “past-future”.
"Through the years we can see many insecurities, painful unnecessary introspections, fallbacks, failures, so many failures, introversion, solitude, immaturity, lack of ability to manage the ruthless material competitive reality. The escape to all of these was creative expression and fantasy, in a quest for acceptance and recognition."
Frank Moth’s collages are poetic compositions of their own creative inspirations: nostalgia, pop culture symbols from the past decades, music lyrics, photographs from the early 1900’s, and other retro - or retrofuture - imagery that portrays the future in a romantic light. Their use of surreal colors and fascination with retrofuture ideas quickly resonated with others, placing them in the top-sellers categories as they began to sell their collages as art prints to people around the world.
"Some of our most loved creations are our decorative floral portraits. In these artworks, the face is covered almost completely with botanical elements, so as to not surrender its vulnerable introspection without a fight. It's an effort to show that every person can have the whole world inside them. (Below is a work from Bloom.)"
Frank Moth have been transporting us to both past and future spaces via their art for over a decade. And about a year ago they decided to move to yet another space, the NFT space. "We've pushed ourselves to delve into new means of expression," says Frank Moth, referring to their experiments with 3D design, animation, and their goal of creating complete collections that focus on a specific theme.
"The NFT space is a world about all humanity, so it concerns us too."
Their newest collection "Hidden in Time" beautifully brings Frank Moth one step deeper into the new NFT space. They carry with them the characteristics that define their personal style and their talent for creating art that evokes universal human emotion. Each artwork in this new collection features a portrait from a classical painting that's been decorated with heavy botanicals and gold elements to express a distinct and timeless human feeling or quality: Anticipation, Wisdom, Patience, Stoicism, Forbearance.
"This shows that these classical portraits, centuries later, still remain timeless and relevant. In a figurative sense, we wanted to symbolize the stoicism and patience of man throughout history, independent of the circumstances, which can be compared to the difficulties of our present times."
Distinctive color palettes, florals, and surreal retrofuture elements give Frank Moth’s digital collages their highly acclaimed and recognizable style, leading them to collaborations with global brands including The New York Times and Adobe, as well as to numerous features in publications including Colossal, Huffington Post and Contemporary Art Curator Magazine.
To create this collection, Frank Moth used: "Opposing desks for 2 people, Photoshop on an iMac, anxiety, liberation, after effects on a Windows laptop, anxiety, deep breaths etc."
TOKENEDITIONS TALKS WITH FRANK MOTH
What led you down the path of being an artist?
First, we want to say it has been and continues to be a very long, slow and painful journey, the one of accepting that we are full time artists.
We think we became artists because we have faced - like most people - grim but also pleasant, stodgy but also beautiful emotions and experiences in our youth, especially our formative years, and later on in adolescence. For some reason, we interpreted them as artistic expressions and we may have taken them more seriously than we probably needed to.
There was a definite hereditary, native and inexplicable sensitivity and inclination. A big part of our course was the acquired stimuli/gifts from our parents as well as the almost not normal solitary boyish preoccupation with fantasy and expression.
Through the years we can see many insecurities, painful unnecessary introspections, fallbacks, failures, so many failures, introversion, solitude, immaturity, lack of ability to manage the ruthless material competitive reality. The escape to all of these was creative expression and fantasy, in a quest for acceptance and recognition.
Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight Zone) famously said “The most important thing about the first sale is for the very first time in your life something written has value and proven value because somebody has given you money for the words that you've written. And that's terribly important. It's a tremendous boom to the ego, to your sense of self-reliance, to your feeling about your own talent.” This quote is applicable for all creatives, not just writers. What did your first sale feel like, and how did it change the course of your life (if at all)? How much was the payment amount, and what was it for?
We remember our first Frank Moth payment very vividly. It was a payment of royalties for one month from one of our Print On Demand partners. It was one of those times where you remember everything. When it was, where you were, what you said on the phone about it, the weird mix of optimism, misery, insecurity, enthusiasm and dreams all together in a 10-minute phone conversation. The amount was very small, it would barely cover the phone's flat fee for the month but it was the first, the real, the unexpected.
It was a very small, almost silent crack in our fragile, mundane, difficult reality. A small crack, a tiny opening that was able to eventually hold and sustain the lives of 2 people.
What do you like to do outside of creating art?
When we don't work, we enjoy whining like old people. Living every uncomfortable, beautiful detail of a family dinner. Feeling nostalgic with an American series from decades past, from the list of series you must see before you die. Lightening the tension of the daunting today by reading books from the list of books you must read before you die. We generally make an honest effort to cast out the memory of death and the gazes into chaos.
Can you talk about your evolution as an artist and your journey into the NFT space?
We've changed so much since the first day we started working. Our equipment has advanced immensely, we have so many more resources in our hands, more raw materials to create, much more time to work and all of these in a weird, absurd way have often made our producing of art harder than before (!)
It could be mainly because internal and external requirements/demands are now greater and it is hard to stay unaffected by all the evolution. It could be because as we grew, we created more "filters" in our eyes and in our aesthetics.
Nevertheless, we move forward.
Especially in NFTs that have taken the artistic world by storm, we've pushed ourselves to delve into new means of expression, like animated versions of our works, the 3D dimension in the end result, the arrangement of the works, the importance of making collections.
We're still trying to steady our steps in the world of NFTs, maybe we initially weren't able to handle the stress and FOMO of the space, but we are truly now starting to enjoy the challenge, from the unexplored possibilities, the immediacy, the absolutely personal distinct element right up to the often unforgiving universality, and the questions and concerns in this world. In any case, the NFT space is a world about all humanity, so it concerns us too.
