The Bob Ross of Memes: Arsonic's Three Decades of Digital Art

Near the end of our conversation, I admitted to Arsonic that I didn't have a title yet. Most artists in this series make work that's dramatic, and his runs on jokes. He took the problem seriously. He tried a phrase through a translator and rejected it. "That's not good." A few minutes later, stalling while he thought up recommendations for the closing segment, he had it.

"I just think about like I could be the Bob Ross of memes for your article, something like that," he says. "He was a funny guy."

It fits. He's easygoing and generous, and he's been making digital pictures longer than most people around him have been online. He's also more exacting than the work lets on.

"I'm probably someone who doesn't take myself too seriously," he says. "I don't like to be just too serious, even though in my work I like things to be done the right way."

Arsonic was born and raised in Quebec City. He's French Canadian, "that's why the accent," and he plays hockey, "of course, because I live in Quebec."

What pulled him in was music. He was a big trip hop fan, Portishead and Björk, and he loved the visuals that came with them, the album art and the light shows, "crazy for the time." Salvador Dalí was another way in. Past that, he resists naming influences. He's taught himself nearly everything he knows.

"You know when you go to school, they all teach the same book to the people, and all those people come out of school with the same idea," he says. "I try to get out of those limits."

He did take art classes in college, more than twenty-five years ago. He painted in oil, mostly abstract, because he was never great at drawing by hand. He was also in the first cohort at his school with access to the digital class, back when Photoshop was on version three. Digital came easier, because nothing was final until you said so.

Before the internet, he ran a bulletin board system on MS-DOS . People dialed into each other's boards on home modems, and you could dress yours up with ASCII and ANSI art. He joined groups of people making it, tags and all. When the internet arrived, he was posting Photoshop experiments to DeviantArt in its early days.

Then he gives me the detail I didn't see coming. "Fun fact, I'm still a boomer," he says, laughing. "I still draw with my mouse."

After college he didn't know what came next, so he took a year off and went west to Vancouver, the Okanagan Valley, and Whistler to learn English. "Quebec is a French province, and we're not really that good in English." He came back, moved to Montreal, worked restaurants and bars for a couple of years, and then started a web marketing agency. He ran it for fifteen years.

The agency also introduced him to banks, with large amounts moving in and out. "You go to bank and you tell them, 'Oh, I need my money. I wanna buy a car,'" he says. "And it's always complicated to even use your own money."

Someone told him about crypto in 2015. You could send ten thousand dollars to anyone, that minute, for a dollar or two in fees. He went all in. "Crypto was very, very marginal and you really had to be a believer to stick around." In 2018 he let the agency go and went full-time. He barely uses a bank now.

The marketing years paid off in how he presents his work. Before he was making art in crypto, he was redesigning crypto projects, because "all crypto projects looked like shit."

In 2017 Arsonic was chief of operations on a crypto project, and one of his hires was Snowfro, who would go on to found Art Blocks. Snowfro told him about Punks and the digital collectibles coming after them. Arsonic was a Bitcoin maxi at the time and didn't buy it.

Then Snowfro asked him to look at the Squiggles and test the first version of the Art Blocks platform, and told him he should make something there. Arsonic teamed up with Sebastian, a partner he'd worked with since around 2016, and they became Zeblocks. Arsonic is the visual guy. Sebastian, in his telling, is "more the brain, the mad guy," the one who figures out how to build Arsonic's crazy ideas.

Their first project, Unigrids, paired each piece with a beat generated and stored on chain. Then came Beatboxes, which Arsonic calls the first VR generative art, and Synesthesia, which shifts with the ambient sound or music in the room. They knew what they were trading.

"We sacrificed a bit of the aesthetic, I would say, for the tech part of it," he says. "We've always been the tech guys around gen art."

Later came Pebbles, made with 6529 acting as a critic. Arsonic says without that push it would have been "a lot less aesthetically pleasing." Its technical trick is quieter: most generative projects don't print well, and Pebbles lets collectors save pieces large enough for a good print.

Nearly all of it invites people in. In Synesthesia you choose where you go. For his newest project, he's asking people to help curate the algorithm. "I feel like people are more intend to enjoy a piece of art if they gather a little attachment to it, like if they've been part of it."

For years, being able to build what others couldn't was their signature. When I ask why he works this way, he follows the thought somewhere unfinished. "Right now it's more difficult because everyone can do it with AI," he says. "But, um, I don't know. I don't know where it went that way."

Sergeant Pepe arrived by accident. He and 6529 were already talking about a generative project. One night the chat turned to freedom to transact, the thing that drew him into crypto in the first place. His profile picture had always been a Pepe. He found a World War II poster about freedom, mixed it with the frog, applied the palette people now know him for, and dropped it in the chat. 6529 loved it. They released it a couple of days later.

He wanted the Sergeant to be someone who helps, who brings visibility to artists. A cast followed, borrowed from TV and movies. El Fafa is the Rambo. Sir Pepe Wallace raises his fist like Braveheart. Pepe Jones is Indiana Jones. The best known may be Sgt pepe, released when the 6529 platform went decentralized: a frog with his middle finger up and "uncensorable" behind him. Everything on the platform, Arsonic says, is now "forever uncensorable."

He describes the style as cartoonish, like Family Guy, "but a bit more messy."

"No straight line. Everything is crooked a bit."

The palette is yellow, green, brown, purple, and a dark brown, five or six colors at most, with a grainy filter laid over everything.

Memes have been his language since the early internet. "I think we can pass a lot of messages through it, good or bad or criticism or anything," he says. "It's always easier to do it with humor." What he finds funniest is absurdity, "something that doesn't make sense at all." He grew up on The Simpsons, South Park, Jackass, and Chappelle. Family Guy is the one he watched most. And there were the late-night Japanese game shows, where "there's a cockroach in a tube and people need to blow in it to send it to the other guy."

He laughs. "My wife don't agree with me."

Zeblocks had what he calls crazy success in 2021, and Sotheby's auctions after that. He admits to some imposter syndrome. "I think any artist that had success eventually have it, if you're not self-centered."

He put the money back into the space. He's spent, in his words, an "astronomical amount of money on emerging artists," and he figures he has a piece from almost everyone.

He minted a stack of early drops from 24 Hours of Art, where I work, at a time when the market was flat. His reason was Roger, who showed up every day.

"I try to always support people who show up," he says. "I don't care if they are super famous or not. If people are grinding and trying to push, I try to help them." He's pulled back lately and hopes the next bull market lets him start again.

He's a father of two, and the family travels a lot. At events he dresses up. At Marfa he'll be a cowboy. At the big New York conference he wore a full Pepe face.

The newest Sergeant Pepe project is a sitcom, a full twenty-four-minute episode made with AI. He plans to keep producing them, Family Guy style, poking fun at whatever's happening in the space.

And then there are the feet. People have joked for a while that he has a foot fetish. He leaned in, and the result is his first solo generative project, coming in the next few weeks.

So what does the Bob Ross of memes want you to know about him? He thinks it over. "I would say I'm more on the fun side," he says, "with a good, good ethical work."

First, psilocybin. He paused. "Microdose psilocybin. Maybe we should specify." It shaped who he is and what he makes, he says, especially earlier in his career, when it was "less micro."

Second, enjoy life. "Don't make things too complicated and enjoy what's in front of you."

Third, love your close ones. For him that means his family and his parents. "I don't know if you can write it better than I say it," he said. I can't.