Daily Inspiration: Meet Aja Trier

Today we’d like to introduce you to Aja Trier.

Hi Aja, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself
I’ve always made things. I know how cliché that sounds: “Oh, when did you become an artist?” “Well, I’ve been painting since I was in the womb!” But really, I’ve always been creative, and I always believed I’d translate it one day into a career. I was always the girl drawing people in class rather than taking notes. I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

As a senior in high school, I became insanely disenchanted with the lack of support for those wishing to pursue creative fields. As the school board was finalizing their plans to build a third gym, we art students were running out of paper and had to use the backs of completed creations while bringing paint from home. I started painting the school: first a ceiling tile in the art room, next a window looking out to the hall. The Vice Principal took notice and asked me to paint a large bay window separating his office from the main office. I gladly accepted the challenge and spent the next few months on the project.

One day I ran out of paint. I squeezed one of the last tubes of acrylic dry and realized, as they were bustling about preparing for the gymnasium addition, that I couldn’t stay. I told the VP after I was done with the mural I wouldn’t be back, and I kept my word. I know that might sound silly and short sighted, but the day I left, I knew I was going to make it regardless. Two months later I attended a portfolio review at the local college and was accepted on the spot. That was really the beginning of my personal quest to make it as an artist.

I quit my job in February of 2003 when I was 5 months pregnant with my son. I was in college and was burning the candle at both ends — full-time college student waiting tables at a local restaurant whilst my belly swelled, and I slowly started to realize all of that was not going to work. I started selling my work on eBay and did pretty well there, but the fees were insane. I mean, one month my fees were more than our rent. It might have said I was a silver power seller over there, but that means little if you’re paying out more than half of that between fees and general business expenses (paints, canvas, shipping supplies, etc.). I had thought it wasn’t such a bad thing at the time because we had two incomes and I was feeling my way around my new venture.

Then, in early 2005, my son was diagnosed with autism. There was a huge change in the family dynamic… Things hadn’t been going so well for my son’s father and I, so in late 2005 we split up, and I found myself alone. It was all squarely on my shoulders for the first time in my life, and I had a two-year-old to care for and no steady paycheck. Talk about struggle. We ended up in a one bedroom apartment in a nasty part of the city, my son occupying the only bedroom while I set up camp in the living room. Those were supremely hard times. I didn’t even have a phone for a month and had to walk down to this biker bar at the end of the road to use the payphone. Luckily, my landlord liked my work, so for a while, we traded art for rent.

At the same time, I was trying my hand at getting into a gallery in the Hamptons. The owner of the gallery was extremely helpful and encouraging and paid ahead for artwork to be shown in the gallery. I even sold my car for a pittance to be able to pay a month’s worth of bills. When I could no longer afford to purchase supplies to create new paintings, I was forced to admit to myself — and the gallery owner — that I wasn’t able to guarantee new work for an approaching solo show. We parted ways. I couldn’t keep going on like that anymore. I wasn’t going to be able to survive much longer and something had to change.

Then, around Christmas 2006 on the eBay message boards, I read about a relatively new site. The site was Etsy, and there was a lot of buzz around it in the art community. Many questioned its viability. I figured I didn’t have anything to lose by giving it a try. Within two days of signing up, I sold a $200.00 painting and was able to pay my utilities for the month. It was the first sign of hope I had in nearly two years. With that one single sale, I realized it was possible.

Sagittarius Gallery, my business, was started in April of 2003 and since then I have been blessed to have over 30000 patrons on 6 continents. Although I primarily sell my work through the net, I have shown at several galleries including the World Monument Fund Gallery / Prince George Ballroom and Rogue Space in Manhattan, and Distinction Gallery in CA. My work has been published in ArtNEWS, American Art Collector, and was featured in Beautiful Bizarre Magazine’s online publication when I had my solo show in MI.

I have always painted in an impressionist manner, but did not think my work looked particularly like van Gogh’s. Selling your work online, people tend to share and abbreviate what they are sharing for their audience. I had painted an Eiffel Tower piece I called “Seine” in 2011 that people started sharing on Pinterest with the caption “Eiffel Tower by van Gogh” and it spread like wildfire. I tried correcting people, but when things are disseminated to such an extent, you can’t catch them all. It’s almost impossible. One day I came across a French educational blog that had an article on Vincent van Gogh that was advertising a trip around Paris to see some van Gogh works and locations – and there my painting was. It was mind-boggling. Especially since it’s damn near impossible for van Gogh to have painted a finished Eiffel tower. He had moved to the south of France on February 20, 1888, well before the tower was completed. He never returned to Paris. The Tower wasn’t completed until March 1, 1889. I’d told people this previously when they would insist van Gogh painted my painting – but when I saw this French educational site touting my painting as a van Gogh, it prompted me to start my “van Gogh Never” series of pieces, showcasing things van Gogh never saw. It was a game. A dare. I wanted to see what people would actually believe van Gogh painted and reshare it as such. The whole thing was hilarious to me, so I started a series of works in van Gogh’s style of other places he could never have seen. It was all very tongue in cheek. The Golden Gate Bridge. The Great Wall of China. The Taj Mahal. Christ the Redeemer in Brazil. It was almost a dare to see just how absurd it could get. From there I painted pop culture scenes. The Delorean from Back to the Future. The ending of the movie Fight Club. Unicorns.

I never pretended to be van Gogh. I still don’t think my work looks like van Gogh. The whole thing exploded out of what really was a joke. I even had a paint party studio not two miles away from me schedule a paint night with that painting and get into an email argument with me when I contacted them to let them know it wasn’t a van Gogh, it was mine. “Oh, so I guess you’re van Gogh, huh?” was literally their retort. I’ve had people scoff and state “someone mistook it for van Gogh? I’ll take things that never happened for 500, Alex.” And that’s fair – I don’t think my almost neon hued, larger stroke, palette knife paintings look like van Gogh’s, either. But it’s what happened. I have the email. Would you believe some people *still* attribute some of these images directly to van Gogh? It was quite the social experiment.

As my little experiment was winding down, I had someone ask me if I ever thought of painting a dog and it just blossomed from there. The first was a Pomeranian laying in the grass. Painting one breed turned into wanting to paint another, and another, and now I have a portfolio of over 100 Starry Night Dogs and Cats. I started receiving a lot of commission requests – Starry Night is one of the most famous paintings of all time and people have an emotional connection to it. It makes them feel something. Of course, I put my own spin on it and my patrons are drawn to these differences – a super bright palette, sunsets, fireflies…it all personalizes it. I’ve gotten a lot of memorial portrait requests, and I think the landscape lends itself to such subjects. It really makes me feel wonderful when my patrons react to the finished product, seeing their pet in a new way.

My Starry Night inspired work has gone viral and I have been featured on Buzzfeed, Business Insider, Mashable, Huffington Post Arts, and was even featured on a Danish game show with my Starry Night dogs!

When you go viral, people take notice of the art and thieves quickly jump at the chance to take your images and plaster them on any manner of products, physical or digital. It’s been a problem I have dealt with throughout my career as an artist. I’ve gotten quite adept at filling out DMCA notices and getting infringing items removed from notorious websites like Aliexpress, Redbubble, and Amazon.

Early in 2021, I decided to jump on the NFT bandwagon and begin minting my art on the Ethereum blockchain via the website Foundation. All of my original NFTs are made by hand animating my original oil paintings using hundreds of individual movement and stabilization points, bringing them to life. Each is a 1 of 1 ensuring a completely unique and original art piece. I’ve sold over 30 of them.

In December of this past year I received notification from DeviantART, an artist portfolio website I have been uploading my art to since 2005, that their new DeviantART Protect program found 86k instances of my art uploaded to the NFT marketplace Opensea. Nearly 100 thousand instances of infringement in less than 30 days listed to an “artist centric” website. I contacted Opensea through their DMCA form and received a canned response about how they have the complaint and will look into it. But new listings were being posted by the minute and their inaction prompted me to take to twitter and publicly shame them for allowing the rampant theft of my intellectual property.

OpenSea doesn’t employ basic safeguards most websites do. Some sites, like Spreadshirt, has an algorithm that detects images being posted that are already in their database. Of course I understand NFTs are about the unique unit of data stored on the blockchain and not as much token that goes along with it, but if you need to upload an actual image to their servers to go along with said number and the whole draw for someone to buy that particular token is because of the image associated with it thereby “owning” it, why can’t they implement a system like Spreadshirt or DeviantArt? The tokens lose value if you have thousands of the same exact image associated with a bunch of different NFTs. So then what is the point? Hell, they don’t even require something as simple and archaic as captcha to make sure there is a real human behind the upload – hence 86k instances of my art being uploaded to the blockchain illegally by a single entity in 30 days. That wasn’t a human – it was a human employing a bot.

Because of this, I was contacted by NBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Verge, and most recently for a TV interview by BBC World News, which airs this coming Saturday.

At the same time as all of this was going on, my husband’s health was deteriorating and he ended up in the ER in early January with a DVT. 2 weeks later he had a stroke and heart attack from an undiagnosed Nonbacterial Thrombotic Endocarditis which was a byproduct of metastatic Esophageal cancer, which was diagnosed on January 29th. I’ve been his full-time caregiver and advocate for 2 months now, and somehow have to still run the business that has sustained us financially since he quit his job to help me in 2017. He’s been there for all of it, from the trip to Sag Harbor, NY in 2005 for my first real gallery show when we didn’t have two dimes to rub together and used the last of our money to rent a car to get there because ours broke down the day before the trip, to now, only 4 months into living in our beautiful San Antonio home that we were able to purchase because of my art. I don’t know what the future holds. He starts treatment very soon.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It was never smooth, or at least not until I had been in business for 12 years. I touched on much of that in the last part.

The biggest challenges are really just going with the flow and recognizing when changes in the business need to be made. I’ve had to adapt throughout my art career to ensure my work remains relevant and in the public eye. I’m always dreaming up new ways to get my work out there and utilizing any and all tools in my wheelhouse. For example, when I first went viral in 2015 with my Starry Night mashups, I was featured organically on Bored Panda and My Modern Met – when I shifted the focus of my work in 2019 to the animal paintings, I contacted each of those publications and said “Hey look, I’m doing something new!” and they grabbed it and I went viral again. It was pretty amazing. When you own your own business like this, you need to do whatever you can to keep it going. We don’t have pensions or 401Ks or retirement plans. We have to do it all ourselves.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a painter utilizing oil on canvas and am primarily known for my Starry Night inspired mashups of pop culture and animals. Again, most of this I talked about in the my story part haha.

I am most proud of making it work. I am not a starving artist – but I absolutely was for over a decade and I never gave up.

If we knew you growing up, how would we have described you?
I was the kid who skipped lunch to go to the art room. Even when I was in elementary school. I still have a ceramic horse my art teacher, Mrs. Costello, made when she was in college. She gave it to me the last day of 5th grade, when I was not only leaving elementary school, but moving out of the district.

I was also the outgoing social butterfly for much of my childhood. I modeled for JC Penny when I was 6 and was even offered a contract with Ford Modeling, but that would have necessitated a move to NYC and my mother was told I would require a tutor, rather than attend public school. She didn’t want me to miss out on my childhood, so she decided against it. I got to hug Big Bird on the runway, so it was all good.

I was a writer as well, and wrote a bunch of short stories that I then illustrated myself, stapled together, and submitted to the school library. In 8th grade, I wrote a 148-page book.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: sagittariusgallery.etsy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sagittariusgallery/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sagittariusgallery.fanpage
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/AjaArt

Image Credits
Aja Trier