“It is kind of looking into your own mind and trying to come up with this map of how everything fits together.”
I love that feeling of my free time when I am just logged into Somnium Space and @Artific is welcoming people to his Art and Coffee gallery for the beginning of the exhibition. Such a nice atmosphere with all around the art and people coming in. Oh wow! DJ is playing music over here like a pre-show. We are listening to Blake’s stream! @iamblakehotz is talking about combining the arts: “Guys, thank you so much for these opportunities to share our artists and let them just hit another platform and share their sound and their emotions. The whole thing is to combine the arts. That’s being created throughout NFTs and the metaverse. It’s a creator’s time! I am so happy about it!” He is also very thankful to Artific and his events. We all are. Just a great idea to enjoy the art and meet each other. Come to join us!
Tom Cantino. That’s the name of @PrismaticTexti1. He started doing painting when he was pretty young but he is also a musician. “Music and the art they go together quite a bit for me,” he says. Tom’s instrument is the drums. He is always thinking in ways of patterns and rhythms and a lot of math and structure is involved in his paintings. In 2016 Tom started getting into abstract art. In that time he has begun the Prismatic Textiles series which he has started with the first cycle of seven paintings. Seven forms. You can see some similarities in all of them. There is a golden ratio spiral, a Fibonacci spiral, a lot of geometry, and also some symbology. Each piece is sort of like a map for a memory palace. Each one represents a phase of the project as a whole. They are walking you through the creative process. I love this continuity. Do you? Tom intends to complete a new cycle of Prismatic Textiles seven paintings each year. Seven foundations as a form to build upon. “After all seven paintings are completed a Digital Loom will be created to combine all seven Prismatic Textiles in an interactive multimedia experience including digital artwork and musical compositions for drum set.”
How did he enter the NFT space? Tom has been working in sort of the traditional art community for a while at a local level. But his paintings are not really traditional. They do have a very digital look to them even though they are created with traditional mediums. “I want them to look both. Very new like some sort of weird digital alien technology but also very ancient like some old tapestry you might find in a castle or even element of cave paintings,” he explains. When Tom started to learn about the whole NFT space it seemed to him like a good way to merge these different worlds. “This traditional art world with all this crazy really exciting stuff going on in the NFT space,” he adds.
Prismatic Textile’s paintings are full of sacred geometry. Have you heard about it before? Even in history art started to discover these forms that you could use to build even very complex things. One of the big sacred geometry things that you can find in a lot of places all around us is called the golden ratio or the Phi ratio. It is an irrational number so it goes on into infinity but you can approximate that 1.618. “You can create a spiral out of this ratio that circles into infinity. You can just keep making that spiral go inwards and inwards and what it does is it actually takes squares. Then if you were to divide that square by 1.618 you get the smaller square and you just keep stacking these squares inwards.” With a few blueprints of shapes, you can come up with all kinds of really interesting geometric forms and patterns. Isn’t it fascinating? Some of these symbols and shapes were discovered a long time ago and they are part of some religious traditions. They are kind of archetypal. “I think there really is something to the whole sacred geometry thing and not so much as a symbol but as structures that can be used for building blocks for creation,” Tom adds.
What do you see when you look at Tom’s artwork? Do you think it is sort of a mirror? Does it reflect the person looking at the piece? Does everyone interpret it according to how they see the world? Tom says: “It is kind of looking into your own mind and trying to come up with this map of how everything fits together. I feel like everyone’s mind is sort of a reflection of all the other minds around them and everything around them in their environment. And so everyone’s perspective is sort of reflecting things in a different way but it is all the same things that are being reflected.”
How does he create the Prismatic Textile series? He paints them on canvas with acrylics so they are all physical paintings even when they look kind of digital as well. It takes a couple of months to paint one. They are quite large and it is also a sort of Tom’s meditation. @PrismaticTexti1 starts with a basic structure, but he is not pretty sure how they are going to turn out until they are done. “There is sort of this general vision or feeling that I have with it.” He let the painting kind of just evolve over time. Layer by layer. “I do a lot of writing during the process so I look at the painting and just kind of make connections of images that start to come to life in it.” Sometimes he does some sketches in between painting sessions. After all, he makes high-quality scans.
Seven Prismatic Textile forms:
“So there’s sort of a way of naming all of these pieces, which I have kind of taken from inspiration from classical music.”
- Prismatic Textile no. 1 The Seedbank
- Prismatic Textile no. 2 The Language Sandbox
- Prismatic Textile no. 3 Triangulation
- Prismatic Textile no. 4 Pyramid
- Prismatic Textile no. 5 Bridges and Tunnels
- Prismatic Textile no. 6 Drawing at the Well
- Prismatic Textile no. 7 The Shadow of a Reflection
On The Seedbank you can see the spiral and the flower of life or the seed of life. “I’ve actually never seen anyone else put the flower of life within the yin & yang symbol like that either. And I’m not sure why because when you create yin & yang, there’s the big circle and then the two smaller circles inside. If you simply rotate those around, you get the flower of life. It just fits so well,” Tom describes.
On The Language Sandbox, you can see the footprints of human history and the path that we’ve taken to get to where we are now. Tom is talking about the four-point cross with mandala right in the center: “The interesting thing about that is these mandalas were used for meditation where you could focus on the center of it. And they actually work well as a tool for achieving focus. Neuroscientists have done studies where if you’re focusing on one central point, with your vision, it triggers a process in your brain where you have more energy and you feel more alert when you’re more focused visually like that.”
On Triangulation, you can see keyboards and some sort of electronic musical instrument on the right-hand side. Those are all connected like cords, so Tom painted there an analog synthesizer, you’d plug in chords to make your sounds. And they’re plugged into the vertical line that leads up to the skull. “This phase is inspired by the idea of the chakra systems and how that applies to psychology and different aspects of creativity. All these structures and things that are represented here, they’re really embedded in our psychology,” he explains.
On Pyramid, you can see its profile. This middle one piece gets a little more simple. You can see kind of this trend in the paintings. They start simple then get more complex and in the middle, it returns to simplicity with number four and then builds in complexity again onwards to number seven. “I’ve always been fascinated with the pyramids, especially how the pyramids have these shafts cut into them where light enters. It is kind of similar to a glass prism where the light shines through it and it comes out as an array of all the different colors.” That’s a very good observation, what do you think?
On Bridges and Tunnels, you can see an element of duality a lot. For example the yin & yang, bridges and tunnels, and almost like a goddess a woman up in the sky reaching down and touching the point of white in front of the train. The train is kind of pulling its way over to where she’s pointing on the bridge. On the other hand, you can see the old man on the clock, a father time. This one is the most favorite one of @Artific and @Ultralord. Oh wow, congratulations! @ASychov, the Somnium Space CEO just bought the genesis piece, The Seed Bank. So great! “It’s really mesmerizing stuff. Thank you! I’ll put it in my parcels to hypnotize people so that they never leave,” Artur is joking.
Drawing at the Well is a kind of a secret mystery because it is not exposed tonight. Go and find it on Tom’s website.
On The Shadow of a Reflection, you can see small little thumbnails of all the other Prismatic Textile paintings that are incorporated into this one. “It’s a reflection of the past, and sort of like, turning the page. It’s the end of the first cycle of paintings. Death and rebirth are the keys to moving on to some sort of higher level of awareness. It could be thought, when you’re a teenager, you think in a certain way, and you have a certain way of approaching life and eventually, a lot of that has to kind of die for you to mature into your adult self. And that happens at any phase of life, where people mature and move on to different things,” Tom says. What do you think about that? Have you been going through life knowing and feeling this?
@TechnologyNf comments: “I really like his works. It’s kind of both a bit psychedelic and realistic, kind of sharp and soft at the same time.”
Tom Cantino also created the Digital Loom. He did that after all the paintings were made as a way to bring them all together. He intends digital Loom as a metaphorical device created by working backward. Tom imagines that as the mechanical loom which wove the fabrics of the Prismatic Textile. He created a shape matrice for each one of the paintings and then other layers of media that correspond with that. So a color scheme and then rhythms that were derived from some of the mathematical structures in the paintings and then combine them all into the loom. You can experience it yourself here.
The exhibition ends and everyone is welcome at the afterparty at Blake’s place in Somnium Space. You can experience VR or join the stream on Artific’s or Blake’s Twitch. Come on! You are welcome!
Artist links:
https://www.prismatictextile.com/
Thank you for your work on this thoughtful article about my work! I love to see how other people see these projects. It always is helpful to see your work through another person’s perspective.