Chiaroscuro on the Blockchain: Paul Reid's Timeless Storytelling

By @JustinWetch

Paul Reid spent an entire year painting a single canvas. Three months is his fast pace. In the NFT world where artists were minting daily, he brought the patience of oil paint to pixels, fooling collectors into thinking his digital work was traditional and having to convince them otherwise.

"I did a few posts on Twitter saying, 'Look, this is digital... These are not oil paintings.' Please stop thinking they're oil paintings."

It's a weird problem to have.

Five-year-old Paul Reid was drawing before he could properly hold a conversation. By seven, dinosaurs consumed every sheet of paper he could find. By primary school, teachers knew him as one thing: the artist. "I remember rushing my work so I could get straight on to the illustrations," he says. While other kids played football, Paul and his friend created entire comic books, attempting pixel art by drawing characters with little squares to mimic the ZX Spectrum games that dominated 1980s Britain.

The identity stuck. Paul went straight from school to art college to his first solo exhibition. No gap years. No finding himself. No plan B.

But the real education came from Ladybird children's books of Greek myths that his parents bought him. Those ancient stories of heroes and monsters imprinted deep. Then came 2000 AD comics. Not Superman or Spider-Man, but Judge Dredd: a fascist lawman dispensing justice in post-apocalyptic Mega-City One. "It wasn't just superheroes. It was post-apocalyptic and punk-ish, kind of semi-political, about totalitarianism. So it was great."

At sixteen, Paul carried his portfolio to a comic convention and handed it to 2000 AD editors. They liked it. Offered him a cover.

He turned them down for art college.

Art college was calling, and Paul answered. But the moment he arrived, his comic dreams hit a wall of academic snobbery.

"The tutors would just look at comic book art and say, 'That's not art, that's just illustration or graphic design.' They were a bit high and mighty about it."

Comics weren't cool in the late 90s. Nobody knew who Iron Man was. The Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't exist. So Paul adapted. He discovered Velázquez and Goya, Manet and Degas. Not the colorful Impressionists but the ones who worked in shadow and light, silver and subtlety.

Scotland has a tradition of bright-colored painting. The Scottish Colourists painted the gray Edinburgh streets like they were Mediterranean beaches. Paul's tutor taught him to paint that way too, with poster paints and gaudy hues.

"I was doing these brightly colored things. And then I just took against it at some point."

Instead, he became obsessed with chiaroscuro, that dramatic play of light and dark the old masters perfected. He'd spend months, sometimes an entire year, on a single oil painting. Building it up layer by layer. Tone first, color almost as an afterthought.

"I concentrate on getting all the light and dark right. And then color is often just something where I think, 'Right, I better put some color here.'”

By 2019, Paul had twenty years of traditional art success behind him. Scholarships to Florence. Exhibitions in Edinburgh. Then he discovered artists on Twitter who worked at Rockstar Games, the studio behind Grand Theft Auto. Their digital concept art intrigued him.

His mythological paintings had caught the attention of the highest circles. He'd served as tour artist for Prince Charles, traveling with the royal entourage to Turkey, Jordan, and Canada, sketching and painting as they went. The future King even wrote an introduction for one of Paul's exhibition catalogs, and his work entered the royal collection. J.K. Rowling commissioned him multiple times for mythological pieces, first through Edinburgh galleries, then sliding into his Twitter DMs years later for another commission. She'd hand him a myth, then step back completely. 'Go off and do your thing,' she'd say. The perfect patron. Mark Millar, creator of Kick-Ass and Kingsman, commissioned him for a Hercules painting just months before the NFT boom. The kid who turned down 2000 AD now had comic royalty, actual royalty, and literary royalty collecting his classical work.

So Paul bought a laptop, downloaded Photoshop, and taught himself through YouTube videos. "Photoshop's got an awful lot of options for somebody who doesn't know what they're doing," he laughs. But Paul approached it like a painter. "Half the things in Photoshop I never use and probably never will."

He mimicked oil paint so perfectly that people refused to believe his digital pieces weren't traditional. He had to post repeated reminders on Twitter clarifying the truth.

Then March 2021 arrived. @beeple sold an NFT for $69 million. Paul's Twitter feed exploded into nothing but crypto art overnight. His friend Trevor Jones, already successful in the space, nudged him forward. "Come on, have a look at this."

Paul's first NFT was Actaeon, a Greek hunter transformed into a stag. It sold on Foundation. Then another. Then another. All mythology, all that distinctive chiaroscuro, all taking months to create while others were minting daily. His sales hovered around 2 ETH. "That would be really good now," he notes, "but back then, that was nowhere near what some artists were selling for."

The backlash came from unexpected places. Other artists who thought NFTs were either a massive scam or an environmental catastrophe turned on their peers who joined the space.

Paul's friend Ian McQue had it worst. A concept artist at Rockstar with 250,000 followers, Ian posted his first NFT on Foundation. The response was vicious. "They attacked him," Paul says bluntly. Ian messaged him: "This has been the worst couple of days of my life." After selling just two NFTs, Ian quit.

Paul had maybe 10,000 followers. Fewer people to turn on him, but turn they did. Even some furries who followed him for his minotaurs and mythical beasts joined the pile-on. "It's just such a bizarre thing," Paul notes. "Only on the internet."

How did he handle it?

"Like everything, I just kind of laughed it off. I thought, 'Well, so what? I'll lose a few followers. I'm sure I'll gain more somewhere along the way.'"

He kept posting. The storm passed. He moved into different circles on Twitter, finding the NFT community surprisingly supportive. Everyone shared each other's work. Everyone knew everyone.

"People were spending silly money on rubbish, absolute rubbish," Paul says about the 2021 NFT boom. "It annoys everybody at some point, obviously. But I'd seen that in the traditional art world already."

In art college, the girl next to him spent four years on her Fine Art degree. Her final show piece?

"Smearing fruit down a blank canvas and letting it dry on the wall." Paul remembers thinking: "Four years you've been here? That's..."

Then there was the banana taped to a wall that sold for $120,000. Conceptual art had prepared Paul for NFT absurdity. He'd had twenty years in the traditional fine art world. Years where sales died and he thought he'd need to get a "real job." Then something would come along. A commission. A show. The cycle would continue.

"When the NFT mania hit, I wasn't a 20-something guy with no experience."

He was in his forties, inoculated against hype, immune to panic. He'd seen booms. He'd seen busts. He kept making art through both.

Paul still paints mythology, but with what he calls "a modern, cinematic viewpoint." Where Rubens and Poussin composed scenes like theater stages, all figures lined up in proscenium view, Paul uses drone angles and floating cameras.

"We're used to all these floating camera angles now. Movies give you that drama from above."

His paintings pack entire stories into single frames. Take his “Theseus and the Minotaur in the labyrinth”, Theseus climbing from a well with a dagger in his teeth, a skull from a previous victim on the ground.

"All these little story elements go into this one image to show what happened before and after."

Mark Millar, creator of Kick-Ass and Kingsman, commissioned Paul for a mythological oil painting just before the NFT boom. The kid who turned down 2000 AD now had comic royalty buying his classical work.

Paul's process remains glacial by crypto standards. Three months for a digital piece. Sometimes longer. Death metal and black metal soundtrack his marathon painting sessions these days. "Usually quite happy to be honest," he clarifies when I ask about his mental state.

The work endures. While the NFT market cycles through its booms and busts, Paul keeps painting his myths in shadow and light, building them layer by careful layer. Collectors finally believe they're digital now. Mostly.

"You've been vindicated," I tell him during our interview, noting his stubborn belief in himself. Paul responds with a surprised "Wow," as if he'd never framed his journey that way.

The boy who drew dinosaurs became the man who paints digital myths with timeless technique. The backlash faded. The stories remain eternal.

Paul shouts out @trevorjonesart for helping him enter the space and becoming a good friend, @basileus_eth for continual collecting, support and his wonderful gifs, @krybharat for collecting and sharing his work, @TheMetFund (Punk2070, Norcal Guy, Bitcoinprophet1) for support through the bear market, and @pranksy for inviting him to be headline artist for NFT Boxes despite Paul "holding up the drop by being too slow."

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @Minotaur_Man recommends @trevorjonesart, @rebeccarosenft ("a great storyteller in a very different visual way"), and @hafftka.