Actor and comedian Jim Carrey, who has become known as a painter and political cartoonist in recent years, announced Thursday that he has minted his first NFT with platform SuperRare.
The NFT, titled Sunflower, is based off his painting of the same name and will be accompanied by an original voice-over, which was produced with filmmaker David Bushell. The auction, which began today, started at $1. Proceeds will go toward Feeding America, a nonprofit network of food banks.
“I’ve been both blessed and cursed in this life with a vivid imagination and a burning desire to share my peculiarities and inspirations with you,” Carrey wrote on Twitter. “This little mood enhancer is called Sunshower. I hope this NFT does for you what it did for me… weeeeeeeee!”
The description on SuperRare’s website for the work reads:
“A sunshower seems like you’re being given a divine gift; a form of medicine with miraculous regenerative potential. It’s hard to hang on to skepticism while the air around you is sparkling like diamonds. Sunshower was created directly from acrylic paint tubes. The backgrounds were poured and the canvas was scraped, leaving only an imprint of each color’s first contact with the canvas behind. In that way, creating Sunshower was a thrilling collaboration with chance, a long climb to a daring cliff dive. The narration is a celebration of our communal light and those quietly exquisite moments that happen for us all.”
“I had merely begun to experiment with bringing my art to life through simple animations,” Carrey said in a statement, “when the NFT world opened up. To me there could never be enough new places to create.”
Carrey’s announcement comes after he revealed earlier this month that he had purchased his first NFT—The Wild Within – ‘Devotion’ by photographer Ryan Koopmans and digital artist Alice Wexell—also on SuperRare.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, Carrey regularly created political cartoons which he would post on Twitter. Over 100 of those works were exhibited in 2018 at Maccarone Gallery in Los Angeles under the title “IndigNation.” The works were shown the following year at Montreal’s Phi Centre under the title “This Light Never Goes Out.” Last year, Carrey announced that he would be stepping away from the project for the foreseeable future.
Carrey has said he first began painting in 2011 as a “way to heal a broken heart.” His work and process was featured in a 2017 short documentary, I Needed Color.
“I think what makes someone an artist is they make models of their inner life,” Carrey says in the documentary. “They make something come into physical being that is inspired by their emotions or their needs or what they feel the audience needs.”