By Shanti Escalante-De Mattei
Talk shows may very rarely book traditional artists as guests, but Monday night digital artist Beeple graced the stage of The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon for the second time.
The artist, a graphic designer based in North Carolina whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, was on the show to celebrate 15 years of his Everydays series, a collection of digital drawings he has made once a day since May 2007. The first 5,000 of those drawings were made into the famous Everyday: The First 5,000 Days NFT that realized $69.3 million at a Christie’s auction in 2021 and launched the unknown artist into international fame.
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For his appearance on The Tonight Show, Beeple was invited to create his daily drawing during the course of the taping. Beeple and the Everydays series were introduced at the beginning of the show and then he was given a space to draw. Beeple came prepared with a 3D rendering of Jimmy Fallon’s head created by a friend of his, artist Raf Grassetti, and filled in the background with some suggestions from the audience, such as the inclusion of flowers.
The resulting work was typical of his signature, slightly whimsical style — Fallon’s head was rendered gigantesque, in front of a full moon, flanked by cherry blossom trees and the bodies of sleeping people (earlier in the segment Fallon had joked that people fell asleep to his TV show).
While it is not known if Fallon collects Beeple’s work, he does own NFTs and is a close friend of the artist and was pictured at the opening of his exhibition “Uncertain Futures” at Jack Hanley Gallery alongside Beeple’s family.
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