Vancouver Voices: Carmilla Sumantry

NFT artist Carmilla Sumantry is on a path of reinvention. Moving to Vancouver two-and-a-half years ago, she started experimenting in 3D art and NFTs to address the feelings of isolation she experienced during the COVID restrictions. Newly emerging as one of Vancouver’s premier NFT artists, she tries to foster the ethos that 3D creators should celebrate each others’ victories rather than compete, and urges the government to create more resources for digital artists.

You're a multidisciplinary artist. I recently read your tweet where you stated that you hated 3D modeling in school. Can you talk about your creative journey?

I have always been interested in art. I always created art growing up, but I never pursued it seriously as a career option because I was intimidated by how difficult that path is. 

I went to school for industrial design, and through that I ended up doing a lot of freelance graphic work. I continued to make art on the side, but industrial design was my career path. I had this five-year plan where I wanted to run my own industrial design agency, and then NFTs came into my life a year ago and totally skewed that.

Now I am focusing on art and the NFT community full-time, and still doing a little bit of freelance work within design as well. 3D art has suddenly become my primary focus and that's a very unexpected turn. 

What a great journey!

Yeah, a lot of twists in it. At the beginning of COVID, I had all this spare time and that's when I initially decided that I was going to focus on art a little bit more. So I started with oil painting and I felt like I had finally found my groove and was starting to develop a consistent style in my art and then a thought came up of, “but what if I did 3D art instead?” I was always interested in digital mediums but I felt like I never had a real outlet for it before NFTs. 

I knew that if I was to go into NFTs, that it would be all or nothing. I was in a bit of a depressed rut at the time as well. I just thought, “okay I'm just going to do this and see what happens.” I went all in and thought it'd only be for a couple months. My cynical side totally expected it to fail, but it turned out really well. 

Sometimes as an artist it's always the battle of the unknown. It’s inspiring to hear how everything seemed to click for you. 

Yeah. When it's your creations and you're trying to sustain yourself by monetizing your craft, there's so much vulnerability in it - what if people don't like this? It means that they don't like me. It's not that I'm not succeeding at my job, it's that I'm putting my soul on the line - there’s so much more emotional pressure than I think your average career path would have in a non-creative industry.  It's super fulfilling when it goes well and when you find success and a community that it resonates with.

‘Isolation’ / Carmilla Sumantry

I was looking at your piece titled “Isolation”. Do you usually explore parallels and abstractions in your work?
With every piece that I create, I don't always have a deep meaning in my mind beforehand. But often while I'm creating, it's like the ideas that are floating around in my head, or how I'm feeling in the moment somehow forms a parallel in the work itself. I think they do inform each other and it somehow ends up making sense in the end. 

Often I really don't know what a piece is going to be about until it's finished. Isolation in particular was the very first piece that I made that I wanted to have as an NFT. And I think it’s so emblematic of my feelings at the time of like, okay, I'm going to dive into NFTs because of COVID and I have been spending so much time alone. I did have this like a burst of creative energy through that and just being able to express it in a new format was a pivotal moment for me in my NFT journey. 

How do you usually approach your work? 

A lot of the time I have to fight myself a little bit because I am technically focused, and with digital art I really want to improve my techniques. When you’re creating digitally, there is a clear progression of skill levels - which is true of traditional mediums as well, but sometimes it’s a little more blurry and you can’t always see the techniques used to achieve a result. With digital art I find you can dissect a piece and see how somebody made something, and you know whether it was difficult to do or not. 

That's not always a marker of whether it's good art or if that piece is going to be successful in the market, or if it's going to resonate with people in a significant way. But sometimes I get caught up in that, and I just want to become a better artist technically. Sometimes that will inform how I create my next piece, and other times I will pull myself out of that and focus on a specific theme or visions that I have. 

Often when I'm about to fall asleep or when I first wake up, I’ll be in this weird hazy state where I picture a scene, and then I want to recreate that in 3D. I also use that as a form of escapism and whenever I'm stressed or having a hard time falling asleep, I like to take myself to a fantasy world. 

Carmilla Sumantry / Carmilla Sumantry

How do you think the art and tech communities could merge here in Vancouver?

That's a good question. I'm new to Vancouver as I only moved here two-and-a-half years ago. I didn't come from a 3D art background so I'm not sure exactly what the industry looks like. I'm more familiar with the NFT artists here. But, I think in general it feels that the art communities in Vancouver are very cliquey and that they don't necessarily support each other. I also feel that I don't have any right to say this because I haven't tried that hard to integrate myself into these communities, but my overall impression of it is that because there's so many starving artists here and very few successful ones, there's a bit of a culture of “we're all in it for ourselves.”

I think the one thing about the NFT community is that there's this idea that has been propagated within it, that the community supports one another. The idea that we’re celebrating each other's victories and not making it into a competition is ingrained into the rhetoric, and I've just been trying to foster that with myself as much as possible with every project that I do, or every other artist I interact with. 

Perhaps some of these art communities feel that fragmented because there's so much pressure just to survive here.  It would be nice if there was more pressure on the government to create more resources for us.

Totally. I also think there's also a bit of a gap in how artists can acquire those resources as well. The government can put out grants or whatever, but does the average artist know where to find them?  

I agree. So for our last question, we have something fun. What is your favorite dish in Vancouver? 

This is hard! I love food so much. I just discovered a spot that's near International Village - it’s a little hole in the wall. The restaurant is called Taishoken Ramen and I order the Karamiso Tonkotsu. I also love the Southern Fried Chicken Sandwich from Catch-122.