Nat Sarkissian is a San Diego-based generative artist whose landscape works simulate the textures of pastel and colored pencil through code.A former software engineer, he came across crypto around a decade earlier but did not engage with generative art until late 2021, after which the NFT market allowed him to support himself through art within about a year.
Sarkissian minted a live collection of 100 generative artworks, seeing the results for the first time alongside the crowd, at a Bright Moments gallery opening in Venice Beach, part of the itinerant project founded by Seth Goldstein. Goldstein described the resulting style as “generative impressionism”, likening Sarkissian's process to that of modern masters such as Monet and Matisse.Sarkissian's landscapes begin as three-dimensional height maps built from noise, and since Reconnaissance (2022), a collaboration with TENDER, he has simulated rain erosion across their surface to carve more naturalistic peaks and valleys. For Eucalyptus and Sagebrush (2023) and Sunset from the Bluffs, he developed a scribbling, oscillating brush technique inspired by colored-pencil and pastel landscape drawings he found on Pinterest.Eucalyptus and Sagebrush was released on fx(hash) as part of “Cure³”, an auction organized by Cure Parkinson's with Bonhams and Artwise to raise funds for Parkinson's disease research.,Earlier, non-landscape works such as Curtain and Artifact (2022) are, in Sarkissian's own words, more representative of the practice he had built over the previous fifteen years, before he began working on fx(hash).
In 2024 Sarkissian released In Deep Spring, a ten-print series made with a pen-plotter system and inspired by road trips along the California coast during an unusually vibrant, rain-fed spring bloom, produced in collaboration with Vertu Fine Art.That May his work appeared in “Material Immaterial”, an exhibition of generative landscape art at the Art Blocks Gallery that coincided with the Marfa Invitational, alongside Matt DesLauriers, Zachariah Watson, Aleksandra Jovanić and Sputniko!.He also took part in “reGEN”, an Art Blocks Presents charitable exhibition reflecting on the regenerative potential of code to benefit research into degenerative diseases, alongside Melissa Wiederrecht, Sputniko!, Robert Hodgin and Marcelo Soria-Rodriguez.
