It’s time for the final part of our Creator Series Talk with Chuck Anderson! 🎙️

In Part 1 and Part 2, we heard about Chuck's career journey and artistic principles. So in this final section, Joe & Chuck move onto the topic of his collaborations with the creative elite—including the legendary Virgil Abloh. Chuck shares how the latter helped him see the importance of tuning out the ‘noise’ and focusing on what's important, and touches on his fascination with the intersection between art and sports. He also gets us hyped about the (now launched) 'Infinite Pressurizer', and the two give their top tips on how we can all unleash our own creativity.

Then Joe shares some bonus Mona Lisa-related advice to bring us home… Leggo 👇

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Joe: I guess going into that a little bit and the types of things that you do that have got you where you are: you've worked with so many different amazing brands and creative people. None more so than Virgil Abloh, who obviously was Chicago-based as well. When you think of people like Virgil and other creatives that you've collaborated with, what are the things that come to mind that they have in common? Do they share any common traits or principles that make them creative, that you observed?

Chuck: I think the people I have loved working with the most over the years share a love of curiosity with me. The Brilliance, which is the site that Benjamin Edgar and myself started in 2004, and then Virgil joined us about two years later, was born out of the fact that all of us were from the Chicago suburbs. Coming from a place like the Chicago suburbs, where there wasn't a whole lot going on, we still had this proximity to Chicago that felt distant but close enough. I grew up thinking that Chicago was this incredible place, but I would only go there every now and then.

All of us had a fascination with New York, and I think it was just a very specific and fairly brief moment in time with the internet in the early 2000s that all three of us, and anyone else who I've met and really gotten on with, shared. Just the immediacy of being able to connect with people on the internet, the immediacy of software applications that allow you to create art and then immediately undo or change something in an instant. It was a sort of impatience and appetite to just make things because you have no other choice, and your mind is sort of hell-bent on filling up white space all the time with ideas big and small. So when I think about all the people I've gotten on with really well over the years, in very different industries and different types of practices than myself, I think the people who I enjoy talking with the most have a good sense of humor. I feel like that's really important. I think it's good to take yourself seriously and your practice seriously, but I'm really good at laughing at myself, making fun of myself, and having a good healthy dose of self-deprecation about the way I see myself and I work. I can take a joke and just move on and roast my friends and vice versa.

Being grounded and pretty down to earth, I think that has to do with growing up. For me, at least, I can speak to my childhood in the suburbs as a very normal, American, basic middle-class upbringing. You just always felt like there was more out there. And as soon as the internet intersected my life, it felt like my gateway to the more-out-there. You know what I mean? It felt kind of like, now I can get there, but I don't have to travel anywhere to do it. Obviously, I've traveled plenty since then, but I think that's really where I would say Virgil thrived. He really did a great job of taking his curiosity and bringing it out into the world and then connecting the dots with other super-curious creative people in all different industries and practices.

What I learned from him over all those years, and something I still try to be pretty good about, is tuning out the noise. I know in conversations over the years with him and with Ben and with other people adjacent to that, other people whose work and practice and disciplines I admired, I think they were really good at keeping the noise at bay. Especially him. There was so much noise all the time. I think he was really good at putting that aside and focusing on the work. No matter how distracted I get in my life or how down on myself I might feel at a certain time, or I don't feel like I can figure out what I want to do, or I'm getting distracted with other things, when I come back to the work and remind myself what I'm good at, and I focus on that again and I post things I'm making, it always works out. When I stop worrying and get back to the crux of the matter, which I think for me is the images that I create, then it feels really good, and you’re reminding yourself that everything else is just bullshit that doesn’t really matter. People who are good at that, I really love. I have no time for or interest in drama; even with NFTs, I don't care to post about the market or talk about this market or that market and people who tweet things like "the space feels so bland and boring right now." It's like, shut up! That’s literally not contributing anything. You should be preoccupied with your own creations and less with critiquing the state of the union of your industry in this space, unless your job is to write about that stuff. If you're an artist, I think you should be mostly preoccupied with where you're at and with your own output. And those are the people who I really relate to.

Joe: Yeah, I totally agree. It's really interesting even from our perspective. As founders of The Possessed I think there are often times where we feel like we need to be communicating a lot, whereas I think our instinct is to just be building and we're constantly having brainstorms and ideas internally about what we're going to build next, and the next creative idea we're going to execute. And our process to this point has always been like, right, we'll agree what the next creative endeavor is and then let's go and pursue it. But from our perspective, you definitely have to bring people along that journey, and I think it was something we had to adjust to post-mint a little bit. But since we dropped our vending machine stuff, we've found a really good balance of doing that.

Chuck: Yeah.

Joe: So I've got one last question, but I'm just going to quickly jump into some AMA questions from The Possessed holders because we were just talking about Virgil there and one of the questions relates to him. This is from Bro88 who asks: as a friend and collaborator with Virgil, did you ever brainstorm ideas for Web3 culture together, and do you know if he had any particular plans in this field that you're aware of?

Chuck: No. The one conversation I did have with him about that was actually very public. Last summer, me, Benjamin, and Virgil put together a Clubhouse. The Brilliance was a blog that we started in 2004 and it just became a place to talk about creativity and artists and music and fashion and whatever we wanted.

We were in the thick of COVID, and Clubhouse was really where a lot of us spent a lot of time. I put a panel together of people, starting with the three of us, and we just talked about the state of the Internet. Bobby Hundreds hopped in and Rob, the founder of Alife. Jian de Leon was on, editor and writer from Highsnobiety, and we just had a really awesome crew of people talking.

Regarding Virgil: I can't speak to it, and I never worked with him on any projects or anything like that, but he certainly had a lot of ideas. And we had talked about what it would look like to form a dow around The Brilliance and there's definitely been some energy around that too, with the Zora team as well and conversations I've had. But yeah, there was the document that he left that was a lot of thinking around that kind of stuff.

But I don't know, I can't really speak for him or as a proxy. But he was really fascinated by that stuff and certainly would have found really creative, clever ways to participate in it if he were still with us, for sure.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely. A fascinating, completely uncompromising creative. Another question we have from one of our holders is from Janitor Kyle. He asks: as a lifelong sports fan, but only a recent art fan, I find your works in the sports world particularly interesting. Could you elaborate on your relationship with sports and what it's been like to create works of art for your favorite sports teams?

Chuck: Yeah, for sure. It's one of my favorite topics. When I grew up, I was very interested in and good at art and drawing. But I also loved sports, and I feel like in the 90s, those two things didn't align a whole lot outside of the old school airbrush artists who would do paintings of players for cards. I don't know, there just wasn't much alignment and athletes didn't really care about art, you know what I mean? The two were at odds, and I think you picked one. I just think that growing up, most kids were either artist-types, in touch with the right side of their brain—the emotional, creative side—or they were more like jocks. There were certainly plenty who had both, but I feel like, at large, there were sport kids and there were art kids and there was a distinction. But I always loved both. I loved playing sports, but I was never particularly athletic enough for it to go anywhere.

And then I really hurt my back in junior high and my time playing sports came to an end. I wasn't able to do it any longer in high school and beyond because I'd broken vertebrae. I still continued loving sports and the aesthetics of the 90s Bulls and of Michael Jordan, the icon—the essence of Jordan, Rodman, and that time was just so iconic and impactful for me that I could never separate the graphic design and the logo and the color palette of that era of the Bulls from my love of sport and crossover with art.

I think it had a lot to do with ESPN Magazine in those early days. My dad had a subscription to it—this big, oversized, 9x12 magazine, probably even bigger than that—and there was just a lot of art and graphic designers in it. And that was my gateway to realizing that a lot of magazines hired artists. I started doing a lot of work for ESPN and sports magazines, and just kept doing it over the years.

And I think I've kind of come full circle. Athletes, sports teams, brands, and companies really have—and I would actually say Virgil has a lot to do with this—a lot of companies are making clothing that athletes are excited to wear and show off and use the tunnel as a runway and all that kind of stuff. I think that aligns a lot with the emergence of art in the more mainstream conversation and zeitgeist that wasn't there before.

And I think you have to credit the Internet for that, certainly. I think the ability to find out what's cool in Japan, say, when you're some kid from St. Louis or something is really powerful. And to see images of players wearing certain clothes or posting art that they like—I think we're in a really interesting time for that.

For me, a lot of my background is in print. I remember I did a whole feature for the Olympics with Time magazine, and they gave me a bunch of photos of Olympians. And obviously, Olympians are the most incredible athletes in the world; but the photos, sort of, don't match that sentiment? Obviously, there's incredible sports photography—but a lot of the time, it's just a Getty image. And it's a cool photo, but they don't want to run it as it is. They don't want to just print it raw, straight off the camera.

And so I would be approached a lot when there were images of athletes where there's movement already, but they wanted the sentiment of the image to reflect the action and the energy that was actually happening in the moment. I see my job oftentimes is to take the mundane and make it exciting—and to take the essence of a photo or an image like that and try to build it up to be more like the way that we remember things, rather than the way that they actually were, which sometimes isn't as exciting. When capturing the energy in the moment of a pole vaulter, for example, or a basketball player doing a dunk—if it's going to be in print, you have to add a certain layer of energy and color and design to the image to get across the impact that the actual moment had. So that's kind of how I see my job when I'm approached to do things for sports clients—to come up with a way to visualize the energy that was present when the action was happening.

Joe: Yeah, it gives you a lot to play with. It's a really interesting one. I think, like you were saying, back at school you had creative people and sports people and maybe the two don't overlap too much—but it definitely feels like those worlds are beginning to collide more and more. Particularly even with Web3, you're seeing athletes dabble in the space and lots of people having PFPs from Web3 projects. So it’s a really cool territory at the moment. Which leads me onto the last question from one of our holders, EPJ: what do you have coming up? What are you hoping to finish or start in the next year? Any collabs and partnerships, in particular in Web3? Do you have much coming up on the horizon? What should we be looking out for?

Chuck: Yeah, the thing I'm most excited about right now, I think, is my partnership and my relationship with Chain/Saw. 2021 was the year of all artists just throwing the kitchen sink at NFTs and, I don't know, every artist was like: New piece on Foundation! New piece on SuperRare! Go check it out!. And then there was a lot of action and a lot of bidding and speculation and heat around that. And it felt like you could almost sell anything because people were just scooping everything up and we didn't know where this was going. Obviously the fervor on that level has come down a lot. That's not to say it's dead by any means—but, I mean, it's not the way that it was in that particular moment. But I do think that that's a healthy thing, ultimately. For me, I just hit a point where the idea of just putting another 1/1 NFT up and then trying to sell it just felt exhausting to me. I was like, I don't want to just keep doing these loose one-off things, I want to really create a body of work. And so September last year—so about a year ago—I had been working on a body of work called Infinite Pressure. I had done a couple of 1/1 pieces on that; I did a collaboration with my friend Joshua Davis, aka @praystation, on one of those pieces. And I really loved this body of work. It was all vector-based and Illustrator-based and involved creating artwork that was meant to have inspiration from generative art but crafted by hand—and with a sheer volume of elements and vector elements that were beyond my control. For each element that was in it, I was just sort of throwing a lot of paint at the wall and then going up to, like, certain little splatters and dots and moving one of them or changing the color, but then leaving the rest of it to be in a sort of level of randomness.

And I just came to love this body of work and ended up launching. I did a collection of 99 1/1s called Infinite Pressure. I collaborated with Chain/Saw to build a completely custom auction house specifically for that. We launched all 99 of the auctions at one time. They were all available to bid starting at .99 ETH, and we sold the whole collection in about four days. It was the most cathartic ending to the hardest I've ever worked in my career. The project came out on March 31st earlier this year, and I think by April 3rd or 4th, the collection had finished selling out. And it was really exciting. That was kind of the only NFTs I've really done now for a while. It was just nice to think about a fuller collection of work. Anyways, all that said, I'm working on something that's going to be coming out really soon, in the next month or two. Chain/Saw and I have been developing a tool called the Infinite Pressurizer, and it's essentially a make-your-own Infinite Pressure SVG Illustrator aesthetic artwork using elements, color palettes, and tools that I've developed in collaboration with Chain/Saw and its software.

We've built a piece of web-based software that you can go on and create work. We're figuring out the mechanics. It's really interesting because Tyler Hobbs put out QQL, and we were like, well, we were going to launch this tool back in January originally, but we just ended up focusing on the auctions instead. And there hasn't really been anything quite like it until Tyler put QQL out. And it kind of did me a favor, because I feel like people are going to understand as a result of that what it means to have a mint pass and then use it to create artwork when you're ready to create artwork. That was always our idea. And I think Tyler sort of ushered in the exposure to that concept on a level that makes, I think, my job a bit easier—because when we're ready to launch it, I feel like people will go, oh, this is sort of like what Tyler Hobbs did.

And they wouldn't be wrong. They had nothing to do with each other. It was just someone else thinking in the same way. And I guess by him putting it out and doing $17 million worth of sales, it was like, well, this has now been seen by a lot of people. Ours is very different aesthetically, and the approach is very different, there's a lot more manual control. But that’s the project I'm just really super excited about right now. It's hard to talk about it without giving all that back story and context.

Joe: That sounds really cool, I look forward to using it. I've always been interested in whether I can play with a piece of software that's more generative and can open up a new area of creativity. Is it just to play with? Are you able to then download the artwork?

Chuck: Yeah, you could download it, but the goal is that you could mint it when you're done. So it's sort of me building the tools and me setting the stage, and then you’re going and taking all these ingredients. I really think of it a lot like a chef. I think about it as if I were doing, like, a cooking class, in a way. Maybe I do all the preparation and I've got all these ingredients set out, and I tell you, hey, you need to make something kind of like this, or you don't need to do anything like that if you don't want to, but here are your ingredients. I chose this batch of colors you can use. I chose these shapes that you can make. But you can really do an infinite number of things with that, however creative you want to be. And that's what's really exciting to me, I think. So I'm excited to see what people make. We've had a lot of friends test it out and been working on it super hard for a long time, and I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

I love the idea of empowering people to just get creative. The concept behind it was to do something that makes people feel pretty quickly like they're making something that looks great. And then if they want to go in there and be more manual with it and start to get more in the weeds and the little details, they can. But I want people to feel a sense of satisfaction pretty quickly. Kind of adjacent to the way that text prompt AI makes people feel like—even though you could be no artist at all—if you type in the right sentence, you're given a painting and you have this sense of, oh, look what I made. And you didn't really make it at all, but you kind of did in a way. But I don't know, that's a whole other topic. But I think there's a sort of magic there that helps people who aren't necessarily creative or feel artistic—it makes them feel something. And I think there's a lot to explore with that kind of notion.

Joe: I mean, to continue your chef analogy…based on my cooking ability, I could take any high-tier ingredients and create some abomination. So curious what happens when it gets to the public! But we'll share it as well. We're all about that kind of empowering creativity.

Chuck: I appreciate that. Yeah. I think it's a really great time right now for artists to be thinking about open source and making things more accessible. It's a great time right now while everyone is worried about, like—I don't know, I really hate it when people talk about, like, oh, bear market this or whatever. It's just like, I don't know. I would have launched the Infinite Pressure project whenever it was ready. And it happened to be a really good time for it. I understand there's economics behind projects, and whatever the case may be, but I think my job as an artist is to really focus on the artwork and let things fall into place. And if I keep my eye on that ball, then it's all good.

But yeah, I just think that right now—as everyone's scrambling to figure out what the NFT space looks like and what it is—I think it's a really great time to build. Yeah, sure, that's the generic thing to say. But I think it's a good time to think about other people and to make resources and access to tools easier and more affordable and more accessible and teach and, I don't know, just make things better for other people if you're in a position to create something like that. So, for me and this project, I don't know how the prices will work and stuff, but anybody could just go use it and download what they've made. Whether you buy something or not is kind of my problem, but anybody can go in and use this thing, and I think that's really important.

Joe: Yes, I couldn't agree more. It sounds really cool. I'm conscious of time, so I'll ask one last question. I think listening to you talk and seeing a lot of your work, it's really inspiring. In our community, we have so many creative people. And I sensed, particularly pre-mint, when we were chatting to people and running creative competitions, there was a real sense of people wanting to be creative and do more things—but they didn't necessarily see themselves as creative people, or didn't really know where to start. Do you have any advice for people who maybe want to start their creative journey? What are the things that they maybe should do to kickstart it...Other than use your upcoming software, of course!

Chuck: I think a lot of people who are in that position feel a temptation to pick what medium that they want to do and be good at and then just decide, like, that's what I am. "I'm a photographer, I can only do photography." Photographers are the first people who I always want to encourage to put their camera down, actually, and maybe try drawing or try something else, only to refine and basically shoot the free throws. You know what I mean? That's kind of how I think of it. Do a lot of the basics that aren't necessarily the meat and potatoes of your aesthetic and without worrying about your style.

I think people should really think about being a well-rounded creative mind first and foremost—have ideas and then go in deeper and refine those ideas with what they do. But I guess my thing is always just to try a lot of stuff. I bought an airbrush a few months ago, and I found that I really love using an airbrush to make paintings, and it's really broadened what I feel. I've been more drawn than ever to making physical artwork than digital, but I think I still dabble in lots of different things.

I also think people don't go deep enough with their own tools. I say put the camera down. But I also think people should pick their camera up and aim it at things that they've never aimed it at before, use it in a way that doesn't feel right. I think it's really important to test the limits of our tools. I think there are artists who use just a ballpoint pen or really basic tools, but push them in ways that no one's thought of before. And for me, something like Photoshop, for example, is the ultimate example of that. It's the most accessible software, everyone's got it, I just know that there are ways that it hasn't been explored before, and that's how I kind of see my goals. I want to go so deep into these tools that I'm using them in ways that the developers of that software never imagined that they could be used for, like the pinned tweet you got up there. I used Photoshop's 3D capabilities in ways that I know for a fact, from talking to Adobe employees, that they did not intend to be used that way. And so I feel like whatever medium you like to work in, just go to some extremes with it. Do things that you don't intend to post, don't post them—or do, I guess, if you want to. But I just think that a portrait photographer, for example, should find some other things to shoot, if only to expand your thinking and the way that you approach your tool.

So I encourage people to try lots of different things, but then also take the thing that they're best at and kind of fuck it up a little bit and use it in a way that doesn't feel right. Or forget all the rules of how you were taught to do something. Or, however you learned how to do it, don't do it that way. Try it in a different way, because you'll often surprise yourself and you can always go back to doing it the way that you know. But I think it's important to embrace all the mistakes and not be too precious about your stuff like that.

Joe: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I'm a big fan of experimentation and trial and error. And I think as well, starting small, not biting off more than you can chew. And try to finish stuff. Be consistent, and if you start on something small, try to get to the end. I remember when I was younger, starting out in design, I was designing something quite complex—I was only halfway through creating it and I was throwing a bit of a strop, saying it looked terrible. And I remember someone said to me, “you've got to finish it. I think the Mona Lisa probably looked shit when it was halfway finished.” That really made me laugh. I think it's true. Start small, finish, and then only judge it at the end.

But Chuck, thanks so much for joining us. It's an absolute pleasure chatting to you and really interesting to hear more about your process. I really appreciate you joining us today.

Chuck: I appreciate you having me on! It's always fun to talk shop and yeah, I really appreciate it. Thank you guys for having me and I look forward to seeing who else you have on. And as you know, I'm quite a fan of conducting interviews myself—I’ve done a lot of stuff with FWB and interviewed you guys before. And I'm always happy when people come up with more outlets or places or whatever to just talk and let people listen in, and I look forward to seeing who you have next.

Joe: Amazing. Thank you so much. Appreciate it.

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Enjoyed the first episode of our Creator Series? Head to the rest of our blog to read more interviews with other inspirational creatives including Jeff Staples, founder of Stapleverse.