Bored Ape NFT artist Seneca continues on his own path with “Portraiture”

Yuga Labs ed Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT rocket ship to one valuation of 4 billion dollars and big metaverse plansbut it was a pseudonymous artist Everyone sees Seneca who led the original design of the disinterested monkeys. Now they are everywhere.

“It’s wild. I mean, I don’t think you can ever get used to that feeling, Seneca said Decrypt of Bored Ape mania. “You can’t help but talk about The Monkeys when you talk about Web3, can’t you? You just can’t escape that world. But yeah, it’s great.”

Although her Ape designs have attracted celebrities, permeated mainstream cultureand been used by NFT owners to create their own projects and products, Seneca has moved towards new frontiers. Her latest work, called Portrait of Senecais currently up for sale through auction house Phillips in a sale that runs until Friday.

Portrait of Seneca spans three digitally animated works characterized as Ethereum NFTs, as well as her first physical artwork to be auctioned – an acrylic and spray paint assemblage called “Portrait of Invocation.” The NFTs were minted through HyperMint, a platform launched by crypto payments startup MoonPay.

The pieces expand on the style that Seneca showcased this time last year, when she released their first original NFT artwork at Art Basel in collaboration with Internet computer.

Her latest compositions similarly show a woman with oversized eyes, in some cases with vibrant flowers and creatures springing through the contacts. They are dreamy and surreal works, but characterized by the shock of body horror. told Seneca Decrypt that the pieces represent her continued development as an artist and individual.

“The reason I focus so much on portraiture is because I find it is so effective at conveying emotion,” she explained. “I kind of met myself in relation to my own reality.”

Seneca recently tweeted advice to the creators to “master something, and then screw it up your own way.” While she acknowledged a “tongue-in-cheek” tone to the tweet, it’s also representative of her own journey to prominence in the crypto art world after formal training as an artist.

“I went to art school and copied the master’s techniques – it was boring to me,” Seneca admitted. But it helped hone her personal style, too: “To create your own style and your own original artwork, you have to mess it up,” she added. “You have to dissect it.”

Beyond the Apes

Although momentum has cooled In the middle of the crypto bear market, Bored Apes is unavoidable on Web3. The project has topped $2.5 billion in trade activity to date, Seneca said Decrypt that she is excited about how NFT owners have taken advantage of the IP rights to develop their own Ape-based personas and projects.

“I really loved how the audience was able to take that character and kind of make it their own,” she explained, “and see themselves through that character — which is something I aim for in my own personal work.”

Seneca served as lead artist for the original Ethereum-based collection, developing the Ape body art and some of the unique features. She told Rolling stone in January that the lack of recognition for her role in the project was “pretty terrible for an artist”, but now she seems more accepting of the level of recognition from the Web3 community.

“I think there’s an aspect of putting out work that you can’t control, right? So that’s not my goal,” she said of recognition and respect for her Bored Ape contributions. “I’m just there to show the best I can do, and whatever life takes from there, so be it.”

When asked if she is still on good terms with Yuga Labs, or if they could potentially work together again, Seneca replied that she is still “connected” with Yuga, but that “we have our separate ways.”

Now signed with major agency United Talent Agency (UTA), Seneca has various plans going forward and said she would love to explore installation work or make an animated film.

“Every new project or endeavor that I take on now is going to stand as the next page in the story that I’m trying to tell,” she said. “But first and foremost, the paintings are the basis for everything I create. So it will always be consistent.”

As an artist best known for his NFT work, Seneca is passionate about royalties for creators, which have come under fire in recent months as some NFT marketplaces stopped demanding that traders pay them. The leading marketplace OpenSea recently announced that it will maintain royalties following backlash from the creatorsbuck the industry trend.

Seneca has been vocal about the issue on social media, saying marketplaces that don’t honor copyright royalties — typically a 5% to 10% fee on secondary market sales — “go against why people have entered the space.” As a commercial artist, she witnessed how creatives are not consistently valued for their contributions.

“This is a revolutionary aspect of commerce [NFTs]. It’s not just art – it’s selling and owning things in the digital realm,” she said. “Royalties [are] not only a functional tool now to encourage and support great leaders and inspire ambitious entrepreneurs, but it is also educating a new generation to truly respect the creative side of business.”