Solemn Stranger is a self-described anon artist based in Manchester, UK, working across glitch art, hand-drawn illustration, music and code. Before entering web3, he worked as a producer, DJ and graphic designer in Manchester's electronic music scene. His NFT practice began in 2021 with the hand-drawn PFP collection StrangersNFT, and has since moved through a year-long Ethereum daily-art project to recursive, code-generated work on Bitcoin.
StrangersNFT is a collection of 300 unique 1/1 profile pictures made in a raw, finger-painted style, a limitation of the digital tools he had at the time. The collection took around seven months to complete, made one by one in order, and drew on early influences including Jake the Degen, Francis Bacon's Screaming Popes, Zafgod and XCOPY. In 2022 the collection was migrated from its original OpenSea contract to a custom Manifold contract, a move he described as necessary to establish clear provenance and free the work from centralization on OpenSea.
