The Surrealist Survivor: Kubti's Cosmic Creations

By @JustinWetch

"The moment we took that right, they started shooting."

Kubti and his neighbor were walking through their Nigerian neighborhood during the Boko Haram insurgency. They'd been cooped up for months. Gunshots were the daily soundtrack. Bomb blasts punctuated breakfast. You get tired of hiding, even when hiding keeps you alive.

They turned a corner. Tank. Guns. Militants.

Bullets whizzed past as they spun and ran. They crashed through the first open door they found. A family stared at them in shock. Then everyone heard the gunshots getting closer. The whole house went silent. For five hours, Kubti huddled in a stranger's home while terrorists prowled outside.

The friend who survived with him that day was dead within months.

"They're sick in the head," Kubti says about the militants. "Sometimes they let you pass, sometimes they just wanna kill you."

This was his second war. The first one, in Libya, had already taken six of his friends.

Growing up in Libya with Nigerian parents meant Kubti navigated five different worlds through five different languages. At home, his parents' Nigerian tongue. In the streets, Arabic punctuated by daily reminders he was different.

"You would hardly make it to the store and come back home without being called racial slurs."

At the American school, English and French. With his sister, German absorbed through pirated broadcasts.

But all those languages meant nothing without the freedom to transact. No foreigners in Libya could have bank accounts. Kubti's father worked at the Nigerian Embassy where accountants flew to Malta monthly to collect salaries in cash.

In 2009, young Kubti discovered Bitcoin. He begged his father to buy some. His father couldn't. No bank account. No card. No access to the system that would let him access the system designed to bypass systems.

The ledger existed but they couldn't touch it.

Libya exploded in 2011. Kubti watched something surreal: his high school friends, kids who spent nights absorbed in Call of Duty, decided to join actual militias. Nobody asked their age. "They were short on men, so they'd recruit anyone."

More than six friends dead within months. Only one survived.

After a year of daily gunfire, Kubti's father made an impossible choice: the family fled to Nigeria while he stayed behind. He'd go five to six years without receiving a single paycheck.

Nigeria greeted them with a blackout. The airport lights cut out the moment they landed.

They arrived essentially homeless. His father's relatives had stolen everything. They ended up in his grandmother's place in the north.

"It felt like I went back in time 50 years," Kubti remembers.

No electricity. Two rooms for too many people.

One year later, war found them again. Boko Haram erupted in the exact town where they'd fled.

After the shooting, after five hours hiding, after losing that friend, something had broken inside Kubti. Years of war had left him emotionally flatlined.

"I completely lost the taste of life. I was tired."

Then one day, scrolling Twitter, an abstract painting stopped him cold. Red bleeding into mustard yellow into maroon. "It wasn't even that good-looking, to be honest," he laughs now. But he stared at it for minutes. Saved it. Returned to it daily. Each time, he saw something different.

This single image cracked something open.

"I noticed there's so much power in creation," he realizes. "I knew I had something in my heart, but I didn't know how to bring it out."

What if he tried learning?

He had that forgotten XRP investment from 2020, maybe ten dollars worth that had grown just enough. He bought a cheap HP Pavilion laptop. Not good. But enough.

YouTube became his university. Adobe Illustrator failed him. Photoshop clicked. Then Blender, despite having no GPU. "The moment you start learning how to connect two or three dots, your ideas start to manifest."

He posted his first NFT on Tezos. Edition of five. Two Tezos each. The community bought all five.

Two dollars total.

"In all my years living in Nigeria, that was the first time I ever made money myself."

Not from a job. Not from family. His own creation recognized by strangers who saw something worth two dollars in his pain made visible. "I still don't feel that joy to this day when I make a sale."

Through creating and writing about his art, Kubti discovered something unexpected: he was accidentally a poet. Art didn't just heal what war broke. It built something deeper.

"I wasn't even this emotional before," he notes. "But after art, I started feeling more."

The partial stroke arrived without warning. Kubti was talking with his sister when his speech started slurring. His left side went numb. A minute later, everything returned to normal.

The doctors delivered their verdict: this is often a preview of the real thing.

From that moment, Kubti restructured everything. No drama. No stress. If conflict erupts in NFT spaces, he leaves. "Your health comes first."

Later, the suffocation became unbearable. "I was mentally dead... breaking," he remembers. In desperation, he told himself out loud: "Just breathe."

The moment he spoke those words, he saw the artwork complete. A character materialized: half ash-gray, half white, head down. A red line cut across its mouth. In Procreate, he added his signature strands.

He wrote: "Despite the storms of our lives, we breathe. Even as the present twists, suffocates you, bringing you to a bended knee, submitting to life, there is a space to breathe. Only in the stillness of a single breath do we reclaim our place."

"I'm just talking to myself," he explains. "But that message for Kubti sometimes ends up being a message for someone else too."

When the 6529 opportunity appeared, mentors MintFace and RegularDad told him: "Use YOUR style. Let that be you." The second attempt channeled everything. A figure made of stone because "for you to bend stone, it's gonna take time." Chains rising from an ocean of survival. A tree growing painfully from the stone man's back. In its hands: a ledger.

"I created it from my heart," he says, "because I knew what I went through." Libya: no freedom of speech, no freedom of transaction, no freedom of movement. Then Nigeria banned crypto again.

Later he created a follow-up: same scene, but the tree was fully grown now. A child stood in its shade. "His offspring don't have to know what happened."

Those signature strands flowing from his figures' heads represent string theory made visible. He learned about it watching The Big Bang Theory after the wars, trying to find something that would make him laugh. Instead he found the universe.

"The humans around me were not nice people," he explains. "But knowing there is God... that concept of the universe became part of my journey."

"Me being connected to you, you being connected to them," he explains about the strands. "If my art is talking about survival, then someone else is surviving out there too. That connects us to the same experience, just in a different mirror."

His process: Blender for the base, Procreate to add strands and smudge textures, Photoshop for noise, Lightroom for final lighting. He listens to piano melodies while he works. "I think I'm mostly sad," he says matter-of-factly. "That's the truth of it."

But he creates positive work now. For himself, but also for friends in the space who feel stuck. He writes three-hour threads most people won't read. "At least I tried."

An anonymous collector named PunksLadsMims swept all his SuperRare pieces after they'd sat unsold for over a year. Still collects from him. Patrick Amadon gave him every opportunity in 2024, literally passing gallery shows to Kubti instead of taking them himself. Manic's relentless belief became medicine: "It's gonna work out, man." Ginger Potter opened the 6529 door.

"I don't have a group," Kubti says simply. "I just create and push it out there."

No PR team. No elaborate marketing. Just authentic sharing.

He's still in Nigeria. Still wants to leave. "My ultimate goal is to leave. That's it." Still feels stuck sometimes. But now he has a language for it all: swirling cosmos, stone men reaching toward light, figures learning to breathe despite the weight of existing.

The boy who dodged bullets in two wars now creates universes where trauma transforms, where stone can grow trees if you give it enough time and pain and patience, where every broken soul connects through invisible strands of shared survival.

Kubti credits PUNKSLADSMEMES aka Gpebbles, @jawniest, @petewnoble (a great supporter, friend, and collector since the day he met him, always encouraging him to “just do it,” seize the moment), @suparno67, and @batsoupyum (always there when advice is needed), as well as @Cryptoknightgal and @Vince_Van_Dough.

He also wants to shout out the entire 6529 community:

“What @punk6529 created is something you really have to experience to understand, it’s a place full of kindness, guidance, and support. They’re building something truly amazing, and I’m grateful to not just witness it but to be a part of it. Special love as well to the bar in 6529, where so many good conversations and connections happen. I’m proud to walk this journey alongside all of them.”

For future episodes of the Weekly Dose of ART, @KubtiTheCreator suggests @amadon, @Gingerpotter_21, and @owlcean11.