Burden Becomes Light: Jesperish's Cathedrals of Feeling

By @JustinWetch

"I could barely walk."

That's Jesperish describing his lowest point: constant panic attacks for months, his art lighting up Times Square while he sat alone in his room, unable to join celebratory calls about his breakthrough NFT sale. The Dutch artist had worked himself into complete system failure, achieving everything he'd strategized for while losing everything that mattered.

But to understand how burden becomes light, we need to start with a boy and a windmill.

Young Jesper grew up in a small Dutch village, son of an architect father and painter mother. This split would define everything: precision versus emotion, structure versus color, straight lines versus human feeling. But there was a third element, a magical structure next to his grandparents' house that obsessed him completely. "I wanted to be the owner of a windmill," he laughs now, remembering his childhood career ambition.

The windmill was everything. He'd climb its wooden ladders, explore its round walls partly buried in earth, watch its massive sails interact with weather.

"It's almost alive," he says. "Like applied art into the world."

He drew windmills obsessively, 24/7 for a period. From his parents' garden, he'd watch it respond to storms and sun, the whole structure becoming a mood ring for nature itself.

Yet the windmill held darkness too. He'd return from that joy to find family conflict at home. In his mind, the windmill began bending into alternate realities, warping with the underlying pressure he felt. Years later, he'd paint "Grandma's Windmill" from that exact feeling: the fantasy structure twisted by drama, beauty bent but not broken.

The village watched him from every corner. That's how young Jesper felt: an emotional kid who wanted to love everyone in a place where belonging meant joining the soccer team, following unwritten rules, becoming predictable.

 "I was a super free spirit," he explains. "Very open and I wanted to be friends with everyone."

But that openness marked him as different.

Gaming became his escape portal. Call of Duty opened new worlds where other outsiders gathered. When esports teams started forming, Jesper went into what he calls "full survival mode." He had to belong somewhere. "I'm not good at a lot of things in society, but I need this," he remembers thinking. He became the screaming kid always on voice chat, grinding until he reached just below pro level.

Not good enough.

So he pivoted with savage efficiency. These teams needed graphics, YouTube banners, social media presence. His sister had taught him digital drawing, his dad had a Photoshop license, and Jesper had something else: synesthesia that made music explode into visuals. When he listened to Noisia's drum and bass, entire worlds appeared in his mind.

"People comment all the time, 'What drugs do you use?'" he says. "I don't do that stuff at all. I just see it in front of me."

By his early twenties, he was designing for Anthony Padilla, JSchlatt, Pokimane. His father, who had experience in running a company, taught him client management between gaming sessions. Jesper learned to work faster than anyone: sometimes two portraits a day plus Twitter banners. But this wasn't following excitement yet. This was calculated visibility. "If people don't see your work, you're not gonna sell anything," he understood early. Every piece of fan art was strategic positioning.

University brought the fusion of all his skills: traditional drawing, animation, 3D, storytelling. Everything building "almost vertical," faster and faster. By day he learned golden ratio and technical drawing. By night he ran a design studio with his SOAR Gaming crew, quality climbing so high they attracted serious clients.

Then came the Spider-Man moment that crystallizes everything about this period. Marvel ran a "Far From Home" fan art contest. Jesper entered with zero love for Spider-Man. "It was purely functional," he admits. He knew winning would boost his portfolio.

He won first place out of thousands of entries.

At the Netherlands premiere, Marvel interviewed him on camera. They cut it entirely. "I knew nothing about Spider-Man," he laughs. "They expected this huge fan but I just cared about art." His university, which had ignored his personal work all year, suddenly wanted to use his win for promotion. He declined.

This was peak Jesper-as-machine: every move optimized, every emotion subordinated to growth. He'd learned from gaming that to be the one among millions, you work harder than humanly sustainable.

"I invested literally all of my time into designing," he says.

What he'd forgotten, fatally, was what he admits now: "self-development and emotions."

COVID and Web3 collided with Jesper already hollowed out. The NFT boom found him with an established Twitter following, perfect positioning. @RogerDickerman and other early collectors bought his work immediately. But as his art gained recognition, his body shut down. Family conflicts, living alone in a new city, the pressure of sudden success: everything compressed into breakdown.

The sale to @CozomoMedici happened while Jesper was having constant panic attacks. Sam Spratt wanted to celebrate with him, but Jesper couldn't speak. Christie's and Sotheby's wanted his pieces. Times Square displayed his art.

 "They're all living it in New York, and I'm just sitting here," he remembers, watching his success on screens while his body rebelled.

Then, at the absolute bottom, something shifted. He calls it a spiritual awakening, though that barely captures the strangeness. Burnt out beyond thought, he picked up a sketchbook and began drawing lines on pure intuition. No plan, no strategy, just movement.

"Stars came out of it."

The geometric patterns that had lived in him since childhood, the golden ratio he'd absorbed from his architect father, the emotional depth from his painter mother, the sacred geometry he'd noticed in churches and mosques and windmills: it all emerged without conscious thought. These weren't calculated designs but something arising from deeper architecture.

The piece that sold to Cozomo was titled "The Burden Which Is Well Borne Becomes Light." He painted it while drowning, somehow knowing transformation was coming.

Recovery took four years. When Jesper finally emerged, he flew to Bali for an art residency that changed everything. "I'd never traveled that far," he says. He notes that he was not part of the residency itself but went for the artists. After years of watching success on screens, he was suddenly living it: communal house with Web3 artists, daily creation in paradise, the contrast of digital nomads against traditional Balinese culture.

Bali gave him a concept he'd been living but couldn't name. He discovered Bashar's idea of "permission slips": objects or beliefs that allow transformation because you believe they will. His childhood crystals and shells, carried for luck, had been permission slips. The windmill itself was a permission slip. Now he creates art as permission slips for others.

"You invite people in, make them believe something, make them more conscious," he explains.

Every piece becomes a portal for viewer transformation, but only if they believe it can transform them. The art doesn't do the work; it permits the work to happen.

This understanding revolutionized his approach. No longer grinding for visibility, he began creating what he calls "alienated nature": digital worlds that merge his synesthetic visions with natural forms, architectural precision with emotional chaos, all serving as cathedrals where viewers can experience their own awakening.

Today's Jesperish creates from pure intuition. His current work pushes into what he calls "brutalist exploration": taking his hand-drawn sacred geometry symbols, duplicating them many times in After Effects, letting generative processes build new forms from ancient patterns.

"What can I rebuild from scratch using only the very basics of life?" he asks.

The NETRA project features eyes as mirrors, forcing viewers into confrontation with themselves. His "Sacred Practice" series offers geometric symbols as meditation tools. Everything aims at the same question: What would human connection look like if we'd evolved telepathic communication instead of speech?

His process remains Byzantine yet organic: sketch on paper (because digital "never brings the same feeling"), photograph the sketch, layer in Photoshop with synesthetic visions as guide, animate through multiple software passes, each transformation revealing new forms. He works in 10K resolution because he's discovered that's the exact size that makes After Effects behave the way he needs.

The windmill boy has become a windmill himself: complex internal mechanisms serving simple purpose, interacting with environment, almost alive. His universalist spirituality ("all religions praying for the same thing"), his synesthetic gift-curse, his fusion of father's precision with mother's emotion, all converge into singular mission: creating wordless understanding.

"When the whole culture is glitch art and noise," he observes about Web3 trends, "I feel it needs balance back to peaceful stuff. Digital art can be meditative."

Against the grain of hype and velocity, he builds quiet cathedrals of feeling, geometric temples where transformation waits for those ready to receive it.

The burden that once crushed him has become light, just as his artwork prophesied. But the real alchemy isn't in the transmutation of pain to beauty. It's in learning that true art emerges not from desperate strategy but from following excitement, that recognition means nothing if you're too broken to feel it, that sometimes stars only emerge from voids.

"Just exploring and staying curious," he says about his practice now. "Not having this strict idea of how things should be."

Currently inspiring him: @SamSpratt, who "frustrated the fuck out of me" trying to figure out his techniques, Omente Jovem for his radical intuitive approach, and @w_movsum for his mysterious mastery of shapes. "Basically everyone I collaborate with inspires me," he notes. "That's why I want to collab with them." He thanks @carlothecurator and @Ninfa_io for playing a major part in his recent artistic development.

For future episodes of Weekly Dose of ART, Jesperish recommends @jakejfried, @joepease, and @omentejovem ("I just wonder what's going on in his head... he seems so laid back"). @Jesperish was recommended by @samanthacavet.