By @JustinWetch
The Kid They'd Turn Around For
Vinnie Hager grew up in Maryland surrounded by art books and encouragement. How-to-draw guides. Graffiti anthologies. One Christmas, his dad got him a Banksy book.
He was always the art kid.
"I was always the kid that if there was a school project with drawing, everybody would turn around and look at me."
He took every art class available. But the real education happened elsewhere. Skateboarding. The DIY ethos of it. Screenprinting shirts. Working at the local skate shop. Making things with his hands because that's what you did.
On drives into the city, he'd press his face to the car window, watching the trains roll by covered in graffiti. Tags and colors blurring past. Something about that stuck.
"Every time I'd drive into the city, I'd always be peering out the window, looking at all the trains filled with graffiti. I think that really inspired me."
He never became a graffiti writer per se. But the mark-making, the quickness, the impulse to fill space with your own language: that became the foundation.
Borders of Homework
The shapes came from boredom. Sitting in class, unable to pay attention, Vinnie would doodle in the margins of handouts. Little symbols. Patterns. The same forms repeating.
One day he looked at those scribbles and had a thought.
"I could take this and put it onto a canvas or a T-shirt. It doesn't have to live only on the borders of my homework."
He bought a pre-stretched canvas from the local art store and covered it with his shapes. A school friend saw it and offered twenty bucks. Vinnie was fifteen or sixteen. He started a notebook to track sales: size, colors, materials, price. Organized even then.
"It was a surprise someone wanted to purchase those artworks, and that fueled me to keep going and keep exploring."
He's been drawing these symbols for over a decade now. Recently he found an old sketch from 2012.
"It had a little envelope shape in it, which I still draw now all the time."
By his community college graduation show, the work looked almost exactly like it does today. The style didn't arrive fully formed. It had been forming all along, in the margins, waiting to be recognized.
Throw Paint at the Wall
For years, Vinnie worked on instinct. No plans. No concepts. Just the pleasure of filling surfaces with his marks.
"It's definitely been very unconscious, very intuitive. Very go-with-the-flow and explore, no pun intended, throw paint at the wall and see what comes from it."
Murals, clothing, furniture, architecture. He'd take his patterns and adhere them to anything. Leaving his mark on as many mediums as possible, with no rhyme or reason beyond the joy of it.
Even some of his biggest commissions were mostly improvised. The OpenSea office mural was ninety-five percent freehand.
"Honestly, I think it's 95% improvised and about 5% planned. The only planning comes from knowing what walls I can paint on."
He loves hiding things in his work. Words. Phrases. Little characters tucked into the density. The impulse traces back to childhood: I Spy books, Where's Waldo, building secret levels in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
"If people find those Easter eggs in the art, I love seeing what they think it means."
Drawing became therapy. A way to check his internal temperature. Thoughts surfacing on paper before he even knew he was thinking them.
Then COVID hit. Art school got cut short. Studios closed. Vinnie fell down the Twitter rabbit hole and discovered Web3.
One Thousand Drawings
Vinnie had seen NFT collections of twenty pieces. A hundred. But the bigger drops were always generative, algorithmic. He considered that route, maybe Art Blocks.
Then the light bulb.
"Originally I thought these bigger collections had to be generative. Then I thought, wait, I could hand-draw them all. That was a light bulb moment."
Letters became a thousand unique drawings. His patterns and symbols, displayed in a way he hadn't seen before. For the first time, he planned: rarity charts, colorways, deadlines. He scheduled how many he had to draw per day to hit the October 2021 launch before NFT NYC that following November.
"It was a bit of a blur. Once I got into drawing mode, it was just one after the other after the other."
He hand-titled each piece. Individual names, individual identities, but all part of the same body of work. An “analog generative” collection. He wove in tribute pieces too: a "Vindenza" honoring Tyler Hobbs' Fidenza, a Damien Hirst dot painting rendition, a glitchy XCopy homage called "YPaste."
The response was massive. Around ten million dollars in trading volume. Major NFT communities embraced him even though he wasn't a PFP project, just a single artist. People started using Letters as backgrounds for their profile pictures.
"I wasn't a 10K project, I was just a singular artist, but those communities embraced me."
A Bit of a Blur
Success came fast. Doors opened everywhere. Events, activations, collaborations. The attention was immense.
"Real time, it was a bit of a blur. I was trying to juggle the response, juggle personal life. It opened a lot of doors and definitely fueled my creativity even more."
But Vinnie was also partying hard. Running on fumes and adrenaline. Looking back now, that period is hazy.
"On a personal note, I was kind of drinking a lot and partying a lot. Reflecting now, I realize it was a lot at once."
He’s since toned back the partying and reframed his priorities.
"There's like a weird disconnect. Being on the total opposite side now, only art all the time, it feels harder sometimes to navigate."
The chaos is gone. So is the fog. What's left is clarity, and the strange work of reconciling who he was with who he's becoming.
New Pages
At his grandmother's house in Maryland, Vinnie had kept almost all the artwork/drawings from years prior. Papers he'd saved from high school, sitting there in an archive. He wanted to trace how his style had evolved over five, six, seven years.
Those years held weight. He'd lost both parents. His brother too. Deep trauma threaded through the work without him fully realizing it.
"I had dealt with a lot of personal change in those years. The passing of my parents and my brother, a lot to deal with and work through. So I was curious how my artwork had changed from those events."
He turned those physical drawings into new generative digital works. A project called Diary. New pages made from old ones. He even made a short documentary featuring his grandmother, telling the story of where these drawings came from.
"A lot of those drawings were a type of therapy for me, to get my thoughts and troubles down on paper in different ways."
Now he's taking inventory. Questioning where he wants his art to live. Fewer brand collaborations, maybe. More paintings. A new studio space that still feels daunting and fresh.
"It can break the mold, break the pattern. It can be fluid, it can change."
He reads in the mornings and takes a long walk before looking at any screens. He's relearning to sit still and start slow.
The Wrap
Vinnie shouts @AN5, @bryanbrinkman, and @cloncast, all early collectors and supporters who bought work before Letters even existed.
Artists inspiring him lately: @ripcache, @jakejfried , @Darkfarms1, @omentejovem, @dotjiwa and @johnkarborn.
What does he wish people understood about his work?
"That it's much deeper than just shapes and symbols."
He leaves it at that.
For future Weekly Dose episodes, @VinnieHager recommends @danielkoeth, @nicedayJules, and @ThankYouX.