Nat Sarkissian’s Generative Landscapes Light Up Bright Moments
A black cat on a leash, exquisite pizza and art unveiled on a chilly Venice night
The towel hanging in the bathroom at the Bright Moment NFT art gallery in Venice read, “Wipe away your fears.” About 80 people mingled in the gallery, sipping on beer and wine and eating exquisite wood-fired pizza as artist Nat Sarkissian minted a collection of 100 generative artworks.
It was the latest opening for Bright Moments, the brainchild of Seth Goldstein that’s in the middle of a worldwide tour where it’s opened locations in New York, London, Berlin and Mexico City. Tokyo is next in April. But travel was far from the mind on this night in Venice Beach as four screens showed Sarkissian’s landscapes. Doja, a black cat on a leash, explored the plants lining the exposed brick walls, unless its owner Kelly Pantaleoni was cradling her in her arms.
The show had a common theme with one the gallery threw in New York in 2021 for artist Tyler Hobbs, where the NFTs were unveiled for the first time to both creator and buyer. Sarkissian had spent months creating and fine tuning the computer code that created his generative artworks. Bugs had to be ferreted out, colors and textures tweaked, until he was ready to go live with it before this audience. Like the Hobbs show, this night in Venice had an energy derived from the fact that the artist was seeing his work for the first time, right alongside the crowd and the NFT’s buyer. It’s one of the most compelling corners of the crypto space.
Listen: Decent People Podcast With Seth Goldstein of Bright Moments
Before the advent of NFTs, Sarkissian couldn’t find a way into the professional art market, he told me in an interview. His art was hobby while being a software engineer paid the bills. Yet for the last year he’s been able to support himself through his art.
“This NFT market has really flipped my life around,” he said. He’d thought he’d be able to do art only after he retired. “It’s absolutely brought that fast forward to now.” Wearing a tan jacket and Vans sneakers, Sarkissian has a black moustache and seemed genuinely amazed that he found himself in this position. He’d first come across crypto a decade ago but ignored it until he caught on to the generative art NFT scene in late 2021.
The crowd at Bright Moments
Sarkissian’s art has the definite feel of master landscape artists such as Monet, yet these creations came to life on the Samsung screens hung around the gallery in layers. Blues and oranges and reds emerging like short brush strokes until the digital canvas was full. The hundreds of hours he poured into the code to make the images is a type of art in itself, but Sarkissian said it wasn’t as simple as the code is the art.
“It feels like live performance because I’m training this algorithm to do the things I want it to do,” he said.
I caught up with Seth Goldstein as the event was winding down. He said a new generation of generative artists were harking back to modern art masters through the code they’re employing. “Generative impressionism, that’s what you’re seeing,” Goldstein said. The question of an artist’s time and output was also on his mind. Whereas masters like Matisse and Monet could spend an unknowable amount of time to create 100 artworks to sell, Sarkissian put his time into the code so that on this night 100 works could be made in a matter of hours.
It’s only been with the advent of web3 and blockchain that talented coders can achieve something more, that “these coders can literally be artists,” Goldstein said.
Sarkissian seemed to share that wonder. “It’s pretty exhilarating to be honest, to be sitting here with the person who’s spent a lot of money” to see the NFT they’ve purchased for the first time, he said. Like the towel in the bathroom, he’d wiped away his fears of going full force into art. That’s the exact message Bright Moments has been spreading for three years now.