Life Work

183:913941826 • August 17, 2022

Paintings from my childhood, brought to life through todays technology

Hello reader, this article is going to be about my new NFT collection, Life Work , if you are not interested in NFTs or art or some British kid trying to tell a short story about painting, then now is the time to click away.

However, if this kind of thing entices you, this should be a gooden.


So, Life Work is a collection with very limited run as the pieces are finite; I cannot add more pieces to this collection, as it is made up of pieces I made as a child. Being that I’m not a child anymore… anything made now wouldn’t count. I believe the collection will end up having fewer than 20 pieces.

When I was a child, my grandmother, or Nanna to me, took me to art classes. I was very young when I started painting, and I believe I started the classes when I was just four years old. This collection is made up of paintings kept from that class, and are all done between the ages of four and nine. For context, I am 25 now, so some of these works are technically classed as vintage, I suppose.

These pieces are now all presented in this collection Life Work , where I have taken the original paintings and interpreted their meaning from the perspective of a much older self. A look back into the mind of a child, through the lens of an adult.

So what made me want to take these paintings and make them NFTs? Well, I have kept them for twenty-odd years and would rather like for them to last a little longer, had I just sold them or given them away, that would be that, who knows what would have happened. Life is harsh, at any time cherished memories can be lost, whether to a fire, a robbery, a flash flood, or any other means.

So, NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are tokens stored on a blockchain, in this case the Ethereum blockchain, the token itself is represented by a media type, usually a JPEG, PNG, MP4, GIF, or MP3, sometimes 3D or AR files too. These files are stored on IPFS, or InterPlanetary File System, a peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. Now that may sound like a bunch of mumbo-jumbo, but it basically means these files are stored permanently, they cannot be lost, and the transactions of these NFTs are kept on a public and permanent ledger, meaning that even if a piece is sold a hundred times, you can always go back far enough and check the original seller, in this case, me.

By purchasing one of these pieces, you are supporting my creative career, and I hope to eventually make a second art collection made up of pieces made 20 years on. I’d like to make the NFTs in the sequel free to anyone that collects from Life Work.

It was a real joy to find these pieces kept safe in my family home, and a joy further to be able to share them with the world, and hopefully have them in the hands… or rather the Ethereum wallets of some of you.

If you would like to collect one of these NFTs, please visit my Foundation page here: https://foundation.app/collection/lifework

For more information about me, feel free to read my first blog ‘Hello World’, or visit my website: https://www.daytimex.com/benni

Happy collecting,
Benni.

Hello, World.

By 183:913941826 • August 8, 2022
Hello, World. This is article one of hopefully many written on here by me, Benni, welcome, this ‘blog’ (?) will document all sorts of crap… and some good stuff too. So who the fuck am I and why am I writing this? Well, my name is Benni, I go by Benni Daytime on socials, but my real name is Benjamin Day, I am a multimedia creative and entrepreneur originally from Hertfordshire, England, now living in Ontario, Canada. Ooo buzzwords, and so early on. I typically hate the word entrepreneur, it reminds me of all the guys who watched Wolf of Wall Street and based their personality on it, none the less it is the aptest description of what I am, I have been entrepreneurial for as long as I can remember, but what the fuck does that mean, what does an entrepreneur do? Google defines it as ‘A person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so.’ which really just means someone who either buys some stuff and sells it or makes some stuff up and sells that, at the root of all businesses is arbitrage, and that is my gig. I started young, going to car boot sales (kinda like garage sales, for my North American friends) and I’d buy stuff cheap to sell it on for more money, easy as that, a little baby shill was born. At about 10 years old I ran a trading card club at my school, where the other kids could come to one of the spare rooms at the end of the day and swap Pokemon cards for Yu Gi Oh or football cards, I would take a small entry fee at the door and the kids would get squash and biscuits. At 14 I started to buy guitars, fix and repaint them and sell them to musicians in my area. At 18 I started Daytime Music LTD. a music production and events company, this eventually evolved and grew to DaytimeX, but that's a story for another time. So anyway, what's a multimedia creative? I like to think of it as a Jack of All trades with anything you can make. I make music, art, and videos, I stream games, I make social media content, and memes, I write, all sorts of stuff, but that’s a lot of name tags so I just say multimedia creative. I’ve been an artist since I was young, my nan took me to art classes from the age of 3 or 4, until I was 8 or so. I did Art, Music, and French at the GCSE level, and although my art teacher hated me, I got pretty alright grades. After that the first time I took it up again other than casually was in the NFT space, first with pixel art, then digital art once I got an iPad. I’m hoping to re-ignite my artistic spark soon. Music has always had a place in my life, my mum was in a band and my dad was a DJ, so I suppose it was meant to happen, I learned guitar when I was 13, I desperately wanted to be able to play Bon Jovi songs on guitar, soon after some friends were making a band, and they needed a bassist, so I learned bass, then drums, then piano. In college, I learned to produce music, I did an Extended Diploma in Music Tech and an HNC in Music, then dropped out to start a music company at 18. Fuck this has gone on a bit, hasn’t it? Right, let's wrap it up. You don’t need to know what happened between 18 and 22, trust me. I’m 24 now, and I run DaytimeX; a social media representation and multimedia production company, made up of Daytime; music, gaming, NFT, merchandise, and me, Benni. So yes, that concludes the first post. Hi, I’m Benni, I make things.