So this is the final result of the 8 hours of live painting. Christian has named the monotype ThinkBoi - during the livestream he told the story of how on Discord he has jokingly been called a "think boi, like a fuck boi but for thinking" which inspired the name for the work. He also mentioned that this process would normally be done in two whole days!! 🤯

Amazing to see an artist's process and hopefully we'd be able to do this again. Which artist would you like to see a livestream with next?! 👀

Thank You AA for organizing such a great event! Happy to get an oppurtunity to witnes the master at work. Love the final outcome of ThinkBoi and is trully remarkable to witness Christian finished this work live.. I  Cant wait for my own piece (Parallex) to arrive 🌹

Thanks for organising!! it was indeed really amazing to see this work come to life! Was great to see the process and thought that went into the different elements 

Presenting.... ThinkBoi

Leave an image in the comments below for van Minnen to layer over the monotype 👀

my beloved cat passed away earlier this month

How do we watch the stream/enter the drawing after we have bought the print?

@acc_20GZFVh0ECSiuUSY23XNK94YSrn pixels are everywhere ~ few 

From life to Death - end up a pixel with Bitbones 

@acc_25TU64i2yfEYmW4vjCftfwotUsO cats are fkn cute but skulls are scary and my gf likes being scared soooo ☠️

@acc_25TiFLW6NP3Wofv4BaORZxSqczi wooooow amazing skull sir

Whats that? Ahhhhh it's my bitbones skull frfr ☠️⚰️⚔️

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/characters/images/0/06/Astro_Boy_%281983%29.png/revision/latest?cb=20190406225854

Not cartoony but I guess could be adapted

My interpretation of Van Goghs Sunflowers 

Suggest an image for the next layer!

Would love to see everyone's favourite works by van Minnen here. Maybe it's the first work of his you saw or even the one work you own... 👀

One of my favourites will always be 'Deez Mothafucking Chakraz' and of course Parallax which is gonna be the first work of his I'll own. Show me what your favourite is below!

Hey @acc_20GZEmf5O4RTZeAloXm0HyYxksH just wanted to say what's up and how stoked I am! I hope that we can get in touch my personal email is qthemusic310@gmail.com

i love 'Deez Mothafucking Chakraz' too - i'd love to own it!

This little guy who I use as a phone background.

Not sure of the title, but absolute love this one from his show at Nanzuka last year. Because Snoop D O double G. 

I haven't seen most of these works, thanks for sharing everyone!

My favorite Christian Rex Van Minnen work has to be his deformed tattoo portraits. This one particularly is one of my favorite works ever... from any artist! 

I love all his work, but the IG live portraits are mind blowing 

hmm usually I do have a favorite piece by an artist I've been following for years but I can't even begin to choose a favorite van Minnen. I love all your selections. Hoping the thread fills up as it will be fun to revisit it. 

Tbh I am really drawn to the flower series and this Parallax print. Another one I find really cool as well. Looks really lovely, beautiful use of colours and tones, so detailed ❤️💐

My favorite is the american dream catcher! @acc_20GZEmf5O4RTZeAloXm0HyYxksH 

I gotta be brutally honest here: his latest Van Minion NFT 1/1 collection has to be my favourite works. I just LOVE that they're animated 🔥🔥

Share your favourite van Minnen! 🥀

Over the last few days I’ve been highlighting elements that interest me in Parallax over on our Discord (https://discord.gg/y4RwvfWcpW) but thought I’d cross post here for the Collective to see! If you browse through the image gallery you’ll see I’ve also included references to other art works and an overview of where van Minnen has featured these elements in his work before. As you’ll see Parallax ties together so many typical features of his work really nicely. 👀

I wanna start with the “hidden” skeleton in the edition. I count three skulls and a handful of gummy bones as part of the bouquet. Skulls are quite a typical symbol in the 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings that inspired Parallax. They were meant to be a reminder of the certainty of death. What I found interesting is that the skulls seem to be partially obscured from sight, almost as if to say that focus should not be on them or their macabre message.

Now onto the gummy bones, just like the skull these are not new to van Minnen’s work. I really like them and for a very simple reason; I feel it’s a little pun, purposely placed in the work just to make you smile. Gummy sweets are easily recognised because of their shiny and squishy appearance. Traditionally, they are made of gelatin which is really not much more than hydrolysed collagen. Guess where this collagen comes from? Yes, it’s bones! Gummy bones, made of bones; elements out of the body, that go back into the body. Full circle in a little sweet, feels weirdly poetic.

Parallax has a lot of heavier elements and I’d like also look at some lighter ones. As some people have mentioned before, the baby in the vessel can give off an eerie feeling but for me it’s more of a hopeful note. The skull and bones are typical reminders of mortality while both the baby and the butterflies make me think of lightness and life.

The symbols of a foetus and butterflies have been featured in van Minnen’s work before, often in opposition to more gloomy elements in his painting. To me the vessel holding the foetus almost reads like a womb holding new life, birthing the bouquet that holds the skulls. Life leading to death, the natural order of things. The butterflies then not only add an aesthetically pleasing element but can also hold a little message, one of hope. Butterflies have been used by many artists before to indicate hope and optimism in their work. My personal favourites being the butterflies of van Gogh and Dali.

Parallax features a lot of gummy elements but the two that first caught my eye were the knives and striped flowers. Now the knives are a more recent element in van Minnen’s work, being prominently featured in many of his paintings from 2019. Vanitas paintings commonly feature knives as a sign of human vulnerability. I love that they are made of gummy, actually rendering them unable to do any harm and contradicting their original meaning. 

The striped flowers I’ve seen in van Minnen’s earlier work and they instantly reminded me of striped tulips. These tulips were considered rare and incredibly valuable, leading to an insane speculative bubble in the 17th century also known as tulip mania. While the flower became a real status symbol, in painting it also often symbolises foolishness probably due to their association with the craziness around their speculative trading. They can be seen in the work of many famous Dutch masters like Rembrandt. Now what’s interesting about this variety of tulip is that while admired for their beauty and rarity, bulb grafting was used at the time to create the striped variants but it wasn’t until more than 300 years later in 1928 that scientists discovered the patterns on the leaves had all along been the result of a virus that infects the tulips. Today Tulip Breaking Virus (TBV) is no longer used to create the effect and instead is the result of cross-breeding and hybridisation.

I love the mini mushrooms, they’ve been featured in quite a few of van Minnen’s works and i really like whenever I spot them. In art mushrooms can refer to many different things but are often a hint to their psychotropic properties. Ingesting them has inspired many an artist, Hieronymus Bosch ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ is one of those typical works said to be created as the result of a very unusual trip.. 

Now on to the floating tooth, honestly I don't know if it is a tooth. I’ve been looking at this thing for days trying to figure out what it is and then I realised it looks a lot like the silhouette of a wisdom tooth. If it is a tooth it certainly isn’t the first, while not a prominent feature in van Minnen’s work I found a work from 2011 that had a whole set of teeth floating in a bouquet. I wonder why the tooth in Parallax is floating so far away and out of focus.

Would love to hear the associations you have with the different elements of Parallax. Van Minnen's art is open to many interpretations so let me know below what it is you see! 🧐

Oh! And the lillies that are just barely about to open!!  The beauty of this life to come, possibly? Lillies also often represent truth, purity, love and peace. 

This painting instantly had a stronger feeling of hope to me when I first saw it, than some of his other gloomier pieces. For many of the reasons you listed and so much of the (perceived) symbology. The purple iris is also a symbol of hope from greek mythology. They are placed on graves to ease guidance to the afterlife. While the grass awn and grass flower often symbolize growth and expansion. 

I'm so excited that this is the available print because of these uplifting themes, in my eyes. I get a love of life and newness from it, with a hinting reminder of the temporary nature of our experience and our bodies. ❤️

woah Those jelly skulls look amazing, same with the bones! I love hidden humour in art

Same!! Looks so safe and warm in there 🏺

I really love the essence of stillness, pre life in the vase, and the chaos that comes out of it (life, once born) 

Agreed, the use of shadow there is really good 🤩  

The tooth was a new discovery for me too! so many amazing details 🦷 🍬 

The detail in the tiny skulls are impressive. 

PARALLAX UP CLOSE 🌹

I’ve been wanting to discuss Christian Rex Van Minnen for a while now. I’m a huge fan of his work and feel like he’s the perfect artist for an up close look. His work is not only recognisable because of the style and subject matter but also due to  van Minnen's painting method. The techniques he applies give his work that signature hyper-realistic quality where the use of light and shadow instantly reminds me of the great masters.

I read various interviews where he spoke about his admiration for famous artists of the Dutch Golden Age and Italian Renaissance. So it comes as no surprise that he taught himself their painting techniques. Amazingly enough he’s fully self taught, using lots of books and years of training to perfect his skill. The oil painting technique he uses is similar to that of Titian, the Venetian method, which builds up many layers of colour over a light underpainting with transparent glazes for shadows and more opaque finishes for highlights. When dry, these layers of oil paint stay slightly translucent, reflecting the light and creating a very glossy finish. Besides this he also uses chiaroscuro, a strong contrast between dark and light that creates dimension in his work, which is particularly noticeable when looking at the gummies he paints.

It's not just oil paint techniques but also the old European masters’ use of composition that inspires van Minnen's own work. According to van Minnen they possess a compositional geometry that helps to create the narrative, especially earlier in his career he would use their work as a “stylistic restraint to play within”, recontextualising a classic work of art into something more modern. A great example of this is ‘Eva Prima Pandora (2015)’ which is based on a work of the same name by Jean Cousin.

The use of these traditional methods and compositions combined with his subject matter makes his work feel historic and contemporary at the same time. This type of contrast really defines his work overall and is why I find it really draws you in. The deformed and bloated characters mixed with the bright and colourful objects. The ethereal painting style contrasted with the surreal subject matter. All his portraits and still lifes seem to create this opposition and make you think. Is it repulsive, is it attractive? Probably both, and that seems to be the point.❤️

🔎 UP CLOSE: Christian Rex van Minnen 🔎

The title of our upcoming edition with Christian Rex van Minnen, Parallax, refers directly to the compositional geometry of the painting and the relationship of what is inside the vessel with what is outside the vessel. Confused? Let us explain! 

Parallax is the effect whereby the position or direction of an object seems different based on the position you are viewing it from. Simply put; based on your line of sight, what you see can varies. In our upcoming edition the bouquet of artefacts narrows at the base, meeting the tapered top of the fetus-filled vessel to form an overall “X” shape. Much like the geometrical outline of the parallax phenomenon.

Historically this phenomenon has also been used in the arts as a metaphor for the object/subject relationship. In Van Minnen’s work depending on one’s "point of view", one can associate qualities of life or death with either what is in the vessel or outside of it. The vessel can be seen as still, calm, warm, and hermetic. Above is a kind of chaos, a mixture of life and death, light and darkness, weight and whimsy.

Depending on your own associations with the objects incorporated, Van Minnen's still-life might bring totally different feelings or ideas to mind for you than for the person viewing the work right next to you. Let us know below how your viewpoint affects what you see in Parallax!  

It was @acc_20GZEmf5O4RTZeAloXm0HyYxksH just had to post it again from my account ;)

Thanks for the detailed writeup @acc_225FaRT70ZnzaftQZ27oNJttVZC! 😍

Parallax explained 🤓

Christian Rex van Minnen

Our timed release with Christian Rex Van Minnen is based on an oil-on-linen original titled Parallax – one of his personal favourites. The work combines traditional painting techniques with modern motifs in an absurd remix of 17th century Dutch Vanitas painting.

Available for 24 hours only, the edition is the artist’s first print release in over a decade and first ever timed release. To mark the occasion we’re hosting an 8-hour long livestream here on the Collective, during which van Minnen will create an entirely new, multi-layered monotype. At the end of the 24 hour release, we will hold a giveaway draw to randomly select one lucky Parallax-purchaser to win the 1-of-1 original monotype!

Click the link below to watch back the full livestream!

Parallax by Christian Rex van Minnen