Founder's story

Learn about what inspired our founder Cynthia to build Faerian

I grew up reading lots of fantasy books. As a teenager, I found an amazing opportunity to do online written roleplaying on forums - a way to write stories in interaction with other people on the Internet. My first inspiration for those stories was simple: fantasy images. I’d collect them on my computer whenever I could. The Internet was a fantastic resource for that.

Then I became an adult, and I had to abandon writing & fantasy for a while. I completed two Masters degrees to secure my future and got a job. One day, I saw my company buying a CryptoPunk NFT for about $150,000, to “invest in the future”. I wondered: why didn’t they buy a NFT from an actual, real digital artist instead of a generative art made with the computer and an algorithm?

To make it simple, NFTs are a new technology from a few years ago that allows digital artists to create unique limited editions of their artworks. It kind of brings them equal next to traditional artists, which is a really exciting opportunity for them! NFTs began to be popular with cartoon-typed monkeys, and is now spreading to art galleries all around the world - even Le Louvre and famous Italian museums.

Then I looked around me. Fantasy art, my favorite art, often digital art nowadays due to the rise of videogames and digital entertainment companies, was nowhere to be found in art galleries in general. The only places where I could find fantasy art, was in old bookshops in Brittany, western France, on small postcards. Fantasy art wasn’t getting the merit it deserved.

Most fantasy artists have to work for an entertainment company to make a living - in illustration for books or video games for example. Meanwhile, Bored Apes was getting millions for silly pictures of pixelated monkeys. I thought it was unfair, that skilled talent wasn’t rewarded enough.

So I quit my job, I went back to my original fantasy images collection from when I was a child, listed the artists I liked the most, and started Faerian, in hope to bring into the art market artwork that speaks to all of us.

I want to present art that makes you travel to another world, go beyond your wildest imagination, reignite your long forgotten dreams.

-Cynthia Mayer, founder and curator of Faerian.