Trevor Jones, Creator of The Bitcoin Angel, on Digital Art, Fine Art, and NFTs

Originally from Canada, Trevor set out in 1996 with a backpack and a taste for adventure. Three years and four continents later, he found himself in Scotland, fell in love with the country and decided to stay.

In 2008 he graduated from Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art with an MA (Hons) in Fine Art and was appointed director of charity Art in Healthcare in Edinburgh.

He went on to teach at Leith School of Art while exhibiting in London, Truro and Edinburgh, staging his first solo exhibition in 2010. Since 2012 he has been experimenting with the potential of QR codes in art and combining AR with traditional oil painting.

In 2015 he co-founded CreativTek Ltd to provide AR services to artists and left Art in Healthcare and teaching to focus on his own art career. He also “hijacked” images in the Royal Scottish Academy and National Gallery of Scotland to showcase his own work, setting up an app to view his paintings in place of Old Masters.

Two years later, he was invited to exhibit AR paintings at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh and took his first dive into Bitcoin and crypto trading. Since then, he has “hijacked” Edinburgh’s National Portrait Gallery and exhibited crypto-themed work at crypto conferences. In 2021 the open-edition NFT derived from his painting The Bitcoin Angel broke sales record and is now iconic in the NFT world.

He also created The Angel’s Share NFT to accompany the record-breaking $2.3m sale of a cask of Macallan’s whisky and collaborated with rapper Ice Cube.

In this conversation, we discuss:

- Introduction to Trevor and his work
- The intersection of fine art and Q.R code paintings
- The importance of motifs and references in Trevor’s work
- Castle Party at Stirling Castle in 2022
 - Castle Party 2023 – what’s coming, and what can we expect?
- Must needs in the studio
- What’s next for Trevor as an artist?