Hampton Bays Artist Breaks Into The World Of NFTs

You could say that Jack Davidson’s creative career really took shape in the hallways of his high school.

“I was always an artist,” Davidson said in a recent interview. “At Hampton Bays High School, I used to just draw graffiti penises everywhere. And really take the time to do it. I’d cut 45 minutes of class and [make] these. It took a while, they were nice pieces of art.

Though his friends knew about Davidson’s phallic proclivities, to everyone else he was anonymous, as many graffiti artists are — known simply as the “penis bandit.”

After high school, Davidson entered the professional world and explored various fields. Although he continued to like making funny art, his phallic creations took a back seat to work and Davidson had stints in real estate, sales and social work. In fact, he was working with underprivileged kids when a friend called him up with some career advice.

“He was like, ‘Dude, you got to bring back the penis bandit with NFTs!”

At the time, Davidson admittedly didn’t know much about NFTs — non-fungible tokens, essentially unique pieces of data stored on a blockchain, or decentralized ledger — but he was still a scrappy kid from Hampton Bays, through and through. So his friend convinced him to try it out and Badfroot was born, a nod to his beginnings as a troubled teen.

Davidson has now returned to his early passion and has been able to make a living off his love for comedy and art. As an NFT illustrator, he is a full-time artist with a growing community.

“There is a little bit of a humble beginning with it,” Davidson said. “But I’m a master salesperson. I’ve done a lot — I’ve sold stocks, I sold real estate, I’ve done everything in between. And what always was a passion of mine was art. That was it. I wanted to create.

“Sometimes that’s not a reality, that doesn’t pay the bills — especially when you grow up out here on a 30-mile strip and it closes up nine months of the year,” he added. “You have to get smart with your money and you have to sometimes let those dreams subside. I’m so glad I didn’t.”

Davidson’s NFT work blew up quickly and now he has a few collections, essentially themed series of his art. There’s Dickers, digital dick stickers which are NSFW (not safe for work) takes on pop culture, featuring Baby Yoda, the Monopoly Man and more — think of it as a continuation of his early penis banditry. He then expanded to Skullkids Immortals, a curated 1/1 collection featuring hand-drawn skeleton figures. That led to a generative Skullkids project called Generations. In the NFT world, generative collections mean an algorithm mixes and matches various traits from a base drawing to create thousands of unique pieces. Coming soon is Warkids and all of these various collections showcase one thing — Davidson’s twin loves of comedy and horror.

These days, he also runs a podcast with Jeff Sarris, his business partner, called “Relentless,” which aims to make the world of NFTs less scary and more accessible.

“[It’s] about being an entrepreneur in the wild west of NFTs,” he explained of the podcast. “That’s an easy place, from a creator standpoint, to see what challenges each week bring and how we conquer it. It’s a really good place to start for people who are new and trying to learn. It’s all free.

“We try to make as much content as possible free because the crypto and Ethereum and NFTs are expensive,” he said. “I know not everybody has money, so we always try to keep everything accessible. My reasoning for it is the more that we open this gate for the regular public to understand, the better that this space is going to be understood and the more success it’s going to have.”

While he is definitely harkening back to his youthful indiscretions in his new career, for Davidson, Badfroot has come to mean much more than crypto penises. He also uses his influence to try to cultivate a supportive community in the midst of the general chaos of the NFT world.

“It’s a lifestyle — it’s this troublemaker with a heart of gold thing,” he said. “If you work and you work and you do the right things, success will come to you. It doesn’t matter how, whether it be NFTs, whether it be real estate. I’ve made so many lemons into lemonade in my life.”

And despite all his success, in the end Davison’s roots are what really matter to him.

“I was born and raised in Hampton Bays, and something that always has inspired me out there is that the media sells this perfect rich kind of thing. And it’s like, well, what about us locals?” Davidson said. “We’re scrappy! And we get down, dude.

“You’ll notice in a lot of my Skullkid art, you’ll see 11946 or 631 tattooed on them. Just because I blew up, I did millions of dollars this year, no matter what I’m always going to be a dirty skate kid from Hampton Bays,” he said. “You’ll never take that from me. I was in Los Angeles for two months working and partying — the whole time I could not wait to get home. I don’t care. I just want to rock with my friends on those shorelines.”

For more on Badfroot, check out his website at badfroot.com/#about or find his page on OpenSea at opensea.io/Badfroot?tab=created_collections. He can be found on Twitter @thebadfroot or Discord via discord.com/invite/nkdbgCEBWA.