Making It Artisan $tories: Apollo Maldando (He Creates Things)

Recorded Nov 18 2025  Host: Adam Benzinane Guest: Apollo Maldonado

My name is Adam and I'm here with Apollo who is an artist and creator from Middletown, Connecticut. Apollo, welcome. (See transcript)

Apollo says:  I create everything from augmented reality, canvas paintings, robotics, electronics. I do a lot of puppetry. I do 3D designing.  I'm just an all around artist. I'm a tinkerer. I like to build things. I don't like to put myself in a little box. I'm just a guy who likes to create things. 

Transcript

 ‘I've been creating art since I was about seven years old.’ 

My name is Adam and I'm here with Apollo who is an artist and creator from Middletown, Connecticut. Apollo, welcome.

 Thank you for having me. Tell me a little bit about your art and yourself. I am an all around artist.

 I create everything from augmented reality, canvas paintings, robotics, electronics. I do a lot of puppetry. I do 3D designing.

 I'm just an all around artist. I'm a tinkerer. I like to build things.

I don't like to put myself in a little box. I'm just a guy who likes to create things. You mentioned you're a tinkerer.

 We're definitely going to get to this guy right here in a moment. I'm interested, where did your creation and art story begin? My father is probably the smartest creative guy that I've ever known. He taught me everything that I know.

He always told me, your hands are a million dollar gift. Your brain is a billion dollar gift. If you use it wisely, you can make anything happen.

 Basically, you can change your life. He guided me and taught me how to create animations. Working on little car models and trying to make the car models as realistic as possible.

Building costumes and building helmets. We did a lot of prop building. He taught me color theory.

He taught me how to paint with oil paint. I would sit there and just watch him. He'd guide me through it and show me how to do all this.

He always told me, I'm going to teach you what I know. So that when you're my age, technology would be advanced enough that you can do what I'm doing better. He called cell phones back in the 80s.

Cell phones we have now, he called back in the 80s. People thought he was crazy. He was building these weird gadgets and machines.

Me and my brother, it's an ongoing joke. We've been saying secretly my father is a CIA agent or something like that. Or he worked for Area 51.

Or he's an alien himself. We were joking around about that a lot. And we still do.

Because he should have worked for Industrial Light and Magic. That's how talented he is. And that's how the things that they build is the things that he's been building.

He actually had a real robot in his basement. A six-foot female robot in the basement that would entertain guests. Really.

My father was really ahead of his time. And he called everything. Everything.

The robots. Everything. He called that all back in the day.

So, yeah, that's where it all started. When I was 10 years old, he basically gave me a Radio Shack book that had all these different circuit boards, like schematics. And said, I want you to read it.

I want you to learn it. I want you to build something. And then I was like, okay.

And then I was building circuit boards since then. Yeah, that's basically my story. If my parents couldn't afford a toy that I wanted, I'd get an old toy.

I'd deconstruct it. I'd put it back together into what I wanted. And, yeah, it was just, creativity did not lack in my household.

My father was always, and my mom always kind of cultivated that as well. From what you tell me about your story, your artistic journey kind of seems to come from a point of sort of an engineering spirit as well. And just figuring out solutions to problems.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I definitely see a lot of that in your work now. Talk to me more about how that sort of informed the art that you make now. I'm very technical when I create.

 I'm very detail-orientated. I could be a perfectionist when it comes to my art and my creations. Everything that my father did, my father was very into Star Wars and Star Trek and any sci-fi movie.

We would watch a sci-fi movie just for the sole purpose of watching the end credits. And after the end credits was always the making of. So the old VHS tapes and the old DVDs always had the making of.

So they showed how they made the movie. So me and my father would sit there and take notes. How do they do this? How do they do that? Oh, we can do this.

And we would do that. So all that growing up actually influenced how I create my art now. Because I don't look at my art in just creating a painting.

I look at it way past it being a painting. I'm like, how can I actually make a painting move? There's some sci-fi movies and even some shows where they would have a canvas or a painting. But that painting would actually move.

Some sci-fi. I remember seeing it when I was younger. And that always stuck to my head.

How can I make a painting move? How can I actually make something that is static come to life? And actually it brings more value to the art. And also it just takes somebody to another world. You're looking at something that shouldn't be doing what it's doing.

Where you're looking at it through your phone in augmented reality. Same thing with me building with 3D models in my own business. And building business cards and everything.

What if the business card can transform and actually become something interactive? When you say problem solving, that's exactly what it was. My father always told me to think out of the box. And he's like, you look at something, how can you make it better? How can you take something and make it do something else? And it was always something that my father cultivated inside of me.

The art that I created in the past was always, how can I make this do something it shouldn't be doing? And I would figure it out. Eventually I would figure out how to actually make it happen. And it influenced what I'm doing now, where I'm getting back into creating a canvas.

Creating a canvas is the whole augmented reality. And actually turning that into not only an interactive piece, but something that might change with the time. So if you look at it at 5 o'clock in the morning, it looks one way.

You look at it two hours later, it looks completely different. But it's still the same painting. Things like that are just ways to kind of bring out more of my creativity.

So it's not just this static painting that is something that's a decoration on a wall. But it can also be something that can turn into a completely different world. Maybe a portal.

A portal. That's an interesting way of putting it. Explain augmented reality for people who aren't familiar with it.

Augmented reality is a digital layer. A digital world that lives over our world. If you think about it like we're physically here right now.

And I can actually put something that isn't here on a digital map. Which is a digital one-of-one map of Earth. I can geolock a digital asset right on top of this table.

It's here. But it's not here. Not here physically.

You can take out your phone and literally pull it out. And you can see this digital asset. This 3D creation, an animation, a character, a toy.

Whatever you want. On this table. It's not only on this table.

It's geolocked to the location. Here. In a virtual world.

But it's not here physically. That's what I do with my paintings. Augmented reality is locked to the painting.

Augmented reality can only be accessed whether you have a smartphone. Or eventually, what they're working on now. And it's already out.

Is the augmented reality glasses. I'm already thinking way past what we have in our hands. I'm actually looking at wearables.

The augmented reality glasses are already advanced now. Where you can see a digital layer over the regular world. What Meta is working on is an augmented reality glasses.

That can actually put 3D assets in the real world the same way your phones would. Instead of taking out your phone and looking at this painting that comes to life. On your phone.

You just have your glasses. And now it's in front of your face. On your glasses.

 That's the technology that's moving forward. Augmented reality clothing. That's already out.

There are actually big companies. Nike. Oreo.

Actually, has an augmented reality package. Where you see an Oreo coming out of the package. And it's a bunch of little Oreos and everything.

A lot of the mainstream companies are already starting to realize. This is the way to go for branding and marketing. I was already thinking about that 3 years ago.

I was like this is where marketing is moving towards. And now that I'm seeing Nike. I'm seeing, Oreo.

I'm seeing Adidas. Because a lot of big companies are starting to get into the augmented reality and digital world. Also called the Metaverse.

 I'm already a few steps ahead of them. Because I've already been building all this. So now we're looking like we need creators to start building all this new creator economy.

So when it comes to the augmented reality. It's just a digital layer that is over either an image. Or geolock to a location.

Which is something that they're working on right now for Art Basel. Which happens next month. It's a lot of augmented reality experiences that are geolocked to the location.

It's just like I said. It's a digital layer that you can access through your smart device. You're touching on a lot of the combination of art and technology.

Because increasingly we're living in a very digital world. Feels like every year there's more and more things that are going on. On our phones, on our computers and even in our glasses.

There seem to be a few camps in the art world on this. There seem to be people who you might describe as innovators. And perhaps you would describe yourself as one of those innovators.

And progress pushers in the industry. And there are also people who seem to be shying away from using any sort of technology. AI or augmented reality or whatever.

And really like the whole sort of physical element of it. What place does technology have in art for you? Digital art started getting really mainstream in the early 2000s. And that's when I started getting into it.

Traditional artists were shunning it. Saying digital art is cheating. If you're creating with digital art, you're never going to make it.

You're cheating. It's not real art. Now everything is made with digital now.

Everything's digital. So you have cartoons like Spongebob and Family Guy and The Simpsons. Went from being a traditional 2D animation to now they're using software like Moho.

Toon Boom I think is the one that they used to create Family Guy and Spongebob. So a lot of these mainstream companies are even Disney. Disney is already shying away.

They already shied away from doing traditional hand-drawn animations. And they're going with digital workflows because it's easier. You can create movies and animations way, way, way faster.

Literally you save money on animators. Like you don't really need that many animators to create a movie now. Because everything's now digital.

Technology plays a huge, huge, huge part into what's happening with not only the art world. But also the entertainment industry as well. Where everything is going digital.

Like a traditional artist would of course walk away and shy away from the digital end of it. Because a lot of them see it that way. It's cheating.

Like when you use an AI to create a painting, that's not real art. In a way they're right. It isn't real art because it's still lacking the human element.

Using AI as a tool to help you come up with concepts. Maybe you have an idea in your head and you're like I want to see what it looks like first. Before I even think about creating it, I want to see how it would look.

So if you know how to talk to the AI, you can guide the AI. Using your own concepts, ideas, color palette. And you're just telling the AI, I want you to create this.

Now show me what it looks like. And you be very specific. You use AI as a tool that way to kind of help bring out the concept.

And you just take it from there. Same thing with AI music. As a tool.

Don't generate the music and say that's my song. You come up with the way you want the song to sound. The tune.

You come up with the lyrics. There's a whole different ways of using this technology to actually not replace what you do as an artist. But to enhance what you do as an artist.

And that's what digital art was from the very beginning back in the early 2000s. To enhance what traditional artists can already do. What you're saying is where there are opportunities or frontiers to use technologies to build on your passions and your interests.

It's like why not just take that. Because there's so much to explore. Yeah, there is.

We've talked a lot about the process of your art. And sort of the mediums and the technology that might go into it. I'm interested as well in sort of the subject matter.

And what kind of provokes you to sit down and complete a painting. What you put on the canvas. What's your process in that? Or does it change every time? It's been a long time since I created a painting.

It's been five years. My most recent painting is a painting I did for WPAA and the art gallery. That was my first piece.

And that was a huge challenge. Because I didn't know what in the world I was going to do. I'm so used to creating one way.

When it comes to like paintings and everything. And my whole thing is I like to create mechanical things. And you know robotics.

Like the painting that's behind me. And I'm so used to creating in 3D. And the same thing with 3D.

I like to create a lot of robotic characters and stuff like that. Where I'm just like I have to kind of get away from that. My first painting being back from painting for five years.

And actually starting to create and actually wanting to get back into it. It has to be something different. But I still want to add that technology layer to it.

My process changes. It all depends on what I'm feeling at that time. And my end goal.

Like this is what I want it to look like. Or this is the feeling I want to convey. There will be days where I'm just like I just want to create something mechanical and robotic.

And there will be days where I'm like okay I want to create something really beautiful. And usually when I say beautiful it's usually like a female subject matter. When I'm creating my paintings.

Most of my paintings are leaning more towards the female end of it. That's really all I saw my father doing. A lot of my work it kind of all ties back to my father's influence.

My father's influence was a lot of like female characters. Different concepts. But there's always a female element in there.

 And it's something that I'm trying to kind of do a little less of. And try to do more of just sometimes even generic art. And just abstract.

I'm not very good at abstract. I don't do abstract. So with this painting that I did for WPAA was some abstract.

And I'm like okay, okay. I tackled that. It's good.

What are the emotions that come up for you coming back from sort of a five year hiatus in painting? Very overwhelming. I'm going to be honest. Creating this first painting.

It being a four foot by twelve foot. Six panels. So two by four panels and everything.

Took a lot out of me. I needed to be pushed. Yeah.

I always wanted to get back into creating on canvas. And that's basically where my heart's always been at. You know, life circumstances.

Just family life and work life. It just, it wasn't happening. It got to the point where I was getting very depressed.

Because I wasn't doing something that, like I knew I had this pull. Like you have to start creating on canvas again. I prayed.

I prayed a lot. And I'm like, I need to be pushed. So I tried everything.

Trying to inspire myself. I would watch other people creating paintings on TikTok. And I would be on their lives and talking to them.

And trying to get some inspiration. Trying to get a drive. Maybe looking at somebody else.

Maybe watching Bob Ross creating a painting. Maybe that will get me. But no.

No. It was when I was asked to create this painting. And I was like, I think that's the push.

And that's exactly what it was. It was a push. And it was such a big push where I was in my garage every single day working on this painting.

Beating myself up. Because I'm like, it's not coming out the way I want it to. Oh no.

And I had to. I really did. I stopped.

I painted over the entire thing. And I did it again. I needed it.

I needed it. It was therapy. It was really.

I went through so many emotions. And so many self-doubt. And then saying.

At one point I was like, I'm not going to finish this painting. I'm not going to finish it. And my wife's looking at me like, what are you doing? What are you talking about? I'm like, I don't know if I can pull it off.

I don't know if I can do this. It's been five years. I don't know if I still have it in me.

I wanted it so bad that when I finally got it. I didn't know if I could even do it. And it was me going through so much.

And trying to figure out. Number one, how I was going to get it done. And number two.

I didn't want it to be a static painting. If I'm using my first painting back. It's got to be augmented reality.

How am I going to do it? I knew I wanted musicians involved. I knew the instruments that I wanted involved. And then I'm like, how am I going to make them play? And at the end, when the painting was all finished.

And I actually got it all done. I was like, okay. Because I filmed the entire process from beginning to end of creating this painting.

When I went back to look at it to edit the video. I sat down and I cried. I cried.

I was like, I didn't think I could do this. I just sat there and I just looked at the painting. And I just cried.

Because this was not only was it me fulfilling what I wanted to do for five years. I accomplished it. I finished a painting.

I have paintings that I haven't finished. I have paintings from 2016 that I haven't finished. I have paintings that I started in 2020 that I haven't finished.

I have a painting literally in my studio right now that it's waiting for me. I have a painting that I started this year for NFT NYC and I didn't finish it. This is my first finished painting.

And it's my biggest painting. And it was very, very emotional. To see getting the augmented reality to work was really a moment.

I freaked out. It's not going to get done. It's not going to get done.

But it worked. All I can say is that it's really something else to see something that I didn't think. That I doubted myself every step of the way to actually see the reaction of people looking at it.

And actually viewing it in augmented reality and just seeing their reaction. I sat there like, oh my God. People really like it.

People really like the painting. I was like, okay. All right.

Now I have the drive. Now I'm like, I know what I got to do now. Now I have the whole mission of why I'm going to do it.

And how I'm going to do it. I think that story, that story to me is one that is not, like the feeling of not being able to complete something. Of needing that push.

To me that sounds not at all uncommon for a lot of artists. I think there's so many people who struggle out there with this sort of understanding that they need to just sit down and do it. But it's so hard.

It's so hard to. And I think the great part about your story is that you did it. Regardless of how long it took, you've accomplished it.

And like you said, that being your largest painting, that's definitely very symbolic. Do you have any sort of advice for people who are stuck in the state you were, say, those past five years? Get pushed. To be honest, that's the only thing that was able to break me out of it.

Was I needed to find something to push me. I needed that push. If someone didn't come up to me and say, hey, I need this painting.

I would have never. I'd probably be not even painting right now. You need something outside of your own four walls to, as an artist.

As an artist, I sit in my studio every day. I see the same four walls every day. It doesn't change much.

You know, maybe a little trinket here, a little trinket there. Maybe clean it up a little bit and make it look all nice and everything. Maybe that will declutter my brain. 

Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it doesn't. When it comes to having this creative block, and that's part of it, having you don't know what you're going to create.

You don't know where to start. You look at a canvas, and that's happened to me where I would stare at a canvas for hours and hours. And then I'm not even going to paint anything now because I just wasted so much time.

You need a push that is outside of you. If you can't push yourself, if you can't get the inspiration, if you can't get that drive, it's hard. Especially if you haven't done it in a while and you're someone who easily self-doubts.

You need someone to come up to you and literally put the brush in your hand and say, do it. My wife was one of those. She actually helped.

She would always ask me, are you working on that painting? And I was like, damn. Yeah, yeah. Okay, I'll get it started.

My wife played a big part. And every time I doubted myself throughout creating this first painting that I've created, she was a big part of it. Always asking me, are you working on it? Sometimes I feel guilty.

And it's true. I would feel guilty. Man, I'm working on this painting, but I should be spending time with my family.

I have my three and a half, almost four-year-old daughter. She was always asking about me. I'm in the garage.

I should be in the house. And that's another part of it, is this family life. Being a husband, being a father, having responsibilities does pull you away from being an artist.

And you have to kind of find that balance. It's hard to find that balance. I think I found it.

I hope I did. I mean, it's a journey, right? It is. The whole thing about balance is you've got to keep it, right? You wobble a little bit.

It's all about balance. Yeah, it's about keeping it. Well, congratulations, honestly.

It's a huge accomplishment. And I think I can definitely say from my heart that that's huge. Getting down and getting pushed to do that and having that support.

Because that's a hard process, too. It's not just the fact that it was those five years. It was also however long it took you to every day doubt yourself and be like, This is not going to happen.

This is not going to happen. And just finally break through. Sort of leap of faith.

Before we end, I do want to ask you about the monkey right there. The monkey helmet with the twitching ears. What's that all about? This is Metabody.

He is a character I designed back in early 2022. And he was just a 3D character. He was an avatar for the virtual world.

It was a metaverse. And the whole reason I created him was because I had a project that I was working on, a 3D project, and it was called Banana Guns. It was just bananas with really cool gun attributes and everything.

And it was just this NFT project that people really liked. And I was like, Wow, maybe I should do a version, too. I only had like five at the time.

I was like, Let me make another five and see if people buy them. But I need an avatar to go with it. I need some sort of utility, something that people can actually use in a virtual world.

So I created Meta body, which is version one. And he looked more like an ape than he does now. I started doing TikTok videos with him.

And people started really liking those TikTok videos. Doing conspiracy theories and talking about CERN and talking about space stuff and UFOs and aliens and stuff like that. So I started getting into doing that and weird things that are happening on Earth.

And then I'm like, You know what? This avatar is really heavy. It has a lot of geometry. Over one million polygons.

And for any kind of game or metaverse, that's really, really, really heavy. You don't want to be nowhere near that. When you're creating game assets or anything that you're going to use in a virtual world.

I simplified him. And that's where this shape started coming into being. And then I was like, You know what? What if I get this character and I make it into a real helmet? I'm like, Can I do that? So let me test it out.

And I created a prototype. This is the second version. So the prototype version of it, I wanted to see if it can actually be done.

I wanted the ears to animate. I wanted the visor to light up. When I talk, I want these cheek vents.

They light up and everything. And I was like, Whenever I talk, I want them to light up. Just like the actual avatar on TikTok.

I did that. It was very fragile. If you move it the wrong way, the ears will break off.

It was very, very fragile. It's been two years. It's been two years since I built it.

And it's hanging on my shelf right now. I was asked to be a live artist for NFT NYC in June. So in April or May, they asked me, Hey, would you like to come to NFT NYC? It's the biggest crypto entity event in the nation.

And we would like you to show up at one of our satellite events. It was from the Pigeons of New York. And it was called The Last Lap.

Because they had their project. And this was their last party until they shift over to a different part of their project. So we went to this place called La Bodega.

This club. It looks like the Bronx. It looks like the outside of the Bronx.

It's got the bodegas. It's got the buildings and everything. And each one had its own theme and everything.

It was really cool. It was a really cool spot. Man, what if I redesigned a MetaBot Ape helmet? And I walk in as the character that everyone knows me as.

Because everyone in Web3 and in these communities, they all know me. My PFP on TikTok and on X is this character. I was like, What if I just walk in as that character? Everybody knows who he is.

So I built the helmet. It took me about a month. I learned my lesson from the prototype.

I made the visor come off so I can see a little bit better, if I'm going to paint live, I might as well do it with the visor off. It has a voice changer.

These are the speakers so the voice comes out of it. It has all these vents so I can breathe. There's a whole bunch of different things.

There's about five computers in here doing what it does. If I move the head, the ears will move accordingly. I actually wore that.

I  made an entire suit, all white and gold and blue. I walked into the event and I basically stopped the show. Everyone was like, It's MetaBot Ape! Everyone knew who he was.

They interviewed me and everything. It was pretty cool. It just became this character that took on a life of his own.

Now I do videos on TikTok with the helmet on. I do it both. I do it without the helmet on.

I do it with the helmet on. When I'm MetaBot Ape, I'm MetaBot Ape. He has a lot more confidence than me, I can tell you that.

This all kind of goes back to what you were talking about. The spirit of the engineer spirit and creative spirit that you got from your dad. Just sort of going ahead and creating it.

I think that's awesome. Thank you so much for joining us and telling your story and your process and sharing your art. It's been a pleasure having you.

Thank you for having me. Of course. My name is Adam, and this has been Making It Artisan $tories.

Thanks to our local producers and team Hercules for production support. As told here, conversations and stories shared in the public interest in StudioW at WPAA-TV and Community Media Center. As told here, brings community media to where you are.