By @JustinWetch

When Mendez was thirteen, he was already freelancing flyers in Paint Shop Pro. He did not understand the concept of layers. If a client wanted a change, he'd paint over the area and redo it from scratch, every single time, because he didn't know there was another way.

"It took me years to figure out the concept of layers," he says. "I was doing freelance flyers with no layers. If someone wanted a change, I would have to paint over and do the change."

By fifteen he had his own portfolio website. By high school he was freelancing web design and branding. He'd been drawing and painting since before he could remember, and the first time his family got a computer, he was in MS Paint immediately. Art and technology were never separate interests for him. They were the same interest wearing different clothes.

Both of Mendez's parents have the same first surname (in Spain, you carry your father's first surname and your mother's first surname, and both of his happened to be Mendez), so he got stuck with it twice. "Somewhere in the family tree there must have been something," he laughs. A client later pointed out that it was actually a pretty cool name. It stuck.

He was born in Northern Spain, raised in the Canary Islands and lived there until seven, when his family moved to the Dominican Republic. First to Santo Domingo, then to Bávaro, the area commonly known as Punta Cana. When they arrived in 1998, there was almost nothing. Three or four hotels connected by roads, then jungle and beach. No internet, no television. Two radio stations, one picked up from Puerto Rico.

"There was very little stimulus," Mendez says, "and so I just drew a lot, painted a lot. I hung out at the beach a lot."

His backyard was literal jungle. He'd come home from school and wander into it for hours. The town was so new that he was part of the first graduating class in its history. There had never been an older kid. He was the older kid.

A family friend ran an internet cafe in Punta Cana, and Mendez worked there during summers, making art all day between customers. This was the early 2000s, before social media, when the internet was forums and message boards. He hung out on Neowin, a tech site with a massive design community, entering branding contests and making avatar-and-signature packs for other users. DeviantArt became another home.

That cafe was his real education. Five bucks for half an hour of access, people filing in and out while a teenager taught himself Photoshop through tutorials and repetition, building the fluency that would make everything else possible.

After high school, a student exchange program sent him to Delaware (the program was a lottery), where his credits were already handled, so he filled his schedule with drawing, painting, photography, and psychology. A classmate mentioned she was applying to FIT in Manhattan. His family's business, the first coffee shop and bakery in Bávaro, was doing well enough to send him.

In 2009, two of Mendez's friends died in a car accident on Halloween night. He was supposed to be with them. He wasn't, by chance, and the proximity of it rearranged something in his head.

"When people close to you pass away, and it could have easily been you, it really puts things into perspective," he says. "What would be left of me that people can see besides pictures, if I had passed away? And there was nothing that I was actually proud of."

He had five or six years of Photoshop experience by then, all commercial. Weeks later, almost by accident, he made his first digital collage. It felt natural in a way nothing else had. He spent a year or two making collage work privately, barely showing it to anyone.

Then he started sharing on Reddit. People kept telling him the same thing: these look like album covers. On the "We Are The Music Makers" subreddit, his second or third post blew up and generated enough commission work for a year. The path forward revealed itself: the music industry could be his market.

The first record label he approached said yes. Dirtybird Records brought him on as their main graphic designer, and he stayed for six or seven years. But his goal from the start was to make the covers, and they made him wait. Five years of earning his stripes before they gave him a residency to design the artwork that actually faced the public.

Meanwhile, he watched traditional contemporary artists with envy, people who could make whatever they wanted and sell it to collectors. "That was for me like, 'Wow,' that's the dream," he says. "But the entry point to that world was unachievable for me as a commercial artist."

When on-chain art markets emerged with what felt like a level playing field, he recognized the opening. "I saw that as, 'Oh, this is it.' I'm going all into this. I'm going to either make it or fail really hard." The Present, his flagship collection of one hundred one-of-ones curated from his daily work, became the vehicle. He's approaching its final chapter now.

The daily practice changed everything. Mendez makes a new piece of digital collage in Photoshop every single day and has been doing so for over two years, 770 works and counting. A friend told him he's "speed running through my art career," and the math backs it up: that volume could have been a lifetime's output.

The process is medium agnostic. A piece might include an old painting, an AI-generated asset, a photograph, an 1800s texture, whatever materializes the vision. He started with public domain source material exclusively, but his ideas outpaced what he could find. AI generation entered as a tool for producing specific assets, not as a replacement for the hand assembly in Photoshop that remains the core of every piece.

"I really hope that people realize that everything I do is through Photoshop by hand, and it's at its core digital collage or digital mixed media," he says.

His cloud-textured faceless figures carry a direct lineage from Magritte, and he's honest about it. "I'm carrying the torch," he says. "I'm expanding on the foundation that Magritte laid." The figures are deliberately featureless so anyone can see themselves in the work. And the work keeps circling the same territory: duality, balance, the tension between what technology gives us and what it costs. He talks about fight-or-flight responses triggered by screens instead of predators, about the Amazon being leveled, about a species that lives like kings and treats the planet like a landfill.

He truly loves maybe twenty percent of what he makes. The rest he likes well enough. "In order to make one good piece of art, you need to make 10 pieces of shit," he says. The daily practice taught him to decouple effort from expectation.

"I've learned to put in maximum effort and have minimum expectations," he says, "and that for me has been a recipe for happiness and success."

"I've never had money," he laughs. "Beach bum, freelancing." People at events want pictures with him now. He finds this baffling. "I'm nobody. I'm still the same surfer guy who makes art and just hangs out." He's exploring art installations on the horizon, but the daily practice remains the engine, where the discoveries happen and the work gets done whether or not anyone is watching.

The last chapter of his “The Present” series arrives on March 17 to celebrate two years since the first auctions went live. 

Early supporters who believed: @todayodious, his first collector. @0xnatluS, a dedicated collector from 2021. Schmrypto who Mendez calls "one of my fucking favorite people of all Web3." @osf_rekt, Jack Butcher, @OGtheperson and @Jediwolf whose vocal support sent loud signals that brought more collectors in. And the core, his collector chat, which he sometimes visits before even opening his timeline.

Artists inspiring him lately: @RJ16848519, for the authenticity of his work. @jackbutcher, for the purity of maximum concept with nothing extraneous, and @0xDominikG, an animator he considers wildly underrated.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, @mendezmendez recommends @schmrypto, @MiraRuido, and @PERFECTL00P.