#MerMay by Chelsea Evenstar | MakersPlace Blog

In the artist’s own words

June 20, 2019, Mike Winkleman’s birthday, kicked off my first attempt at 3D everydays. Mike is a friend, and one night he encouraged me to start doing everydays to learn 3D. His everyday anniversary happens to be my birthday, May 1, so it seemed perfect to choose his birthday to start my everyday journey.

My first piece was ambitious for an absolute beginner and required my husband’s help to complete. The result was amazing, but the everydays took hours upon frustrating hours and required hubby’s help. 

Chelsea Evenstar’s first 3D “everyday,” created for Beeple’s birthday.

I felt overwhelmed by how little I knew about 3D versus the ideas in my head. After less than a month, I gave up on everydays. Mike was not pleased!

Fast forward to May 1, 2022. I had been creating eighteen highly detailed 1/1s for an upcoming pfp project for months. My brain was burning out from the intense focus, so I decided to hop on the worldwide #MerMay bandwagon to exercise my creativity elsewhere. I gave myself 1–2 hours to create a mermaid every day in May while channeling my inner Beeple. My goal was to post a piece of art before I went to sleep and care less about the result than the creative process.

My animated artworks can take weeks to create, so making finished pieces so quickly was weird. Some days I focused on composition. Some days I focused on a color palette. On other days, I slapped something together as fast as I could. Most days directly reflected my inner state. Looking back at the collection, I see a visual representation of my fluctuating moods.

My work celebrates the complexities of being a woman, including the beautiful curves of the female form. Art and advertising too often objectify and hyper-sexualize women. In life and art, society overlooks the nuances of the human being behind the sexy image.

As someone who has struggled to understand my worth as a human outside of society’s objectifying lens, many of my pieces attempt to celebrate women’s deep and powerful humanity. As someone who has struggled to understand my worth as a human outside society’s objectifying lens, many of my pieces attempt to celebrate women’s deep and powerful humanity. We can be smart, angry, curious, loving, sexy, sweet, playful, joyful, sad, powerful, sassy, vulnerable, fierce, protective, nurturing, and any variety of ways – often all at once.

Our swipe-right culture has conditioned men to focus on physical attributes that have nothing to do with the soul of the person “wearing” them. This tendency in the culture robs both men and women of the ability to connect deeply with and respect one another. 

I hope my art inspires even my male collectors (especially my male collectors) to connect with their own vulnerability.

In these moments, people can see each other, empathize with each other,…