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).
