Nat Sarkissian

Artist

Nat Sarkissian · natsarkissian.com ↗

Raster

raster.art/artist/nat-sarkissian ↗

Based

San Diego, California

Practice

Generative systems spanning digital images, simulation, plotted drawings, and machine-applied paint

Now

Presented Sunlight through Wild Roses with Heft in New York in 2025

In the set

Life and Love and Nothing ↗ · 200 editions

Links

Full bibliography ↗

Nat Sarkissian is an Armenian-American generative artist based in San Diego. His practice explores light, simulation, and complexity through software, producing works that range across realism, impressionism, and abstraction. Physical outputs may be made by hand or through pen plotters and embroidery machines, allowing computational instructions to acquire texture, resistance, and material irregularity.¹ This movement between screen and object is central to his work: code establishes a field of possibilities, while each execution reveals a particular image.

Sarkissian has described the running of code, and what occurs after execution, as the locus of the art. That position shifts attention away from code as a polished artifact and toward behavior, emergence, and visual consequence.² His systems often draw upon nature, especially the landscapes of California, without treating computation as a neutral tool of description. Instead, natural forms become prompts for examining how memory, geometry, light, and randomness can coexist.

Landscape after execution

Early projects established the breadth of this inquiry. California Hills in Late Sun and Eucalyptus and Sagebrush pursued organic, impressionistic terrain, while Artifact and Curtain returned to harder surfaces and impossible spatial constructions. Sarkissian has linked that contrast to a longer interest in simulated environments, explaining that abstraction and landscape are related branches of his generative practice rather than opposing phases.² Eucalyptus and Sagebrush was subsequently included in Cure3, an initiative connecting art sales with Parkinson's research.³

Other releases translated specific places into coded atmospheres. Sunset from the Bluffs evokes the ocean, warm soil, coastal vegetation, and the emotional uncertainty of early adulthood through simulated oil pastel. Bright Moments records the project as a collection of 100 minted works.⁴ Verse presented Hello Modulo in March 2023, situating Sarkissian's experiments with modular forms and representation within a wider program of computational art.⁵

This landscape practice is not simply mimetic. Its recurring subject is the instability of perception itself: how a system can make light feel remembered, how geometry can appear organic, and how repetition can preserve difference. In 2025, Sunlight through Wild Roses extended this logic into both digital and physical form. Its plotted edition used acrylic paint pens on cotton paper, with the algorithm directing marks at sub-millimeter precision while the materials supplied their own tactile variation.⁶

Live on Art Blocks: life-and-love-and-nothing-by-nat-sarkissian ↗

Regeneration as form and subject

Art Blocks released Life and Love and Nothing on October 25, 2023 as a collection of exactly 200 unique artworks.⁷ The project joined reGEN, a five-artist initiative supporting Cure Alzheimer's Fund. The associated auction program framed generative art as a system in which an artist defines an algorithm and randomness produces distinct outcomes, with each participating artist offering 200 variations.⁸

Within Sarkissian's contribution, regeneration operates at two levels. It is the procedural basis of the edition, where repeated executions yield individual states, and the narrative structure of a landscape exposed to destruction and renewal. An Art Blocks collector profile describes the work as a wildfire consuming a cabin and hillside before the scene regenerates and begins its annual cycle again.⁹ The collection therefore makes duration legible. A landscape is not presented as a permanent image, but as a temporary condition inside a recurring process.

The reGEN sale generated a $100,000 donation for Cure Alzheimer's Fund through works by Sarkissian, Melissa Wiederrecht, Sputniko!, Robert Hodgin, and Marcelo Soria-Rodríguez.¹⁰ This context gives the collection's imagery a precise institutional frame: renewal is both an aesthetic mechanism and the organizing metaphor of a benefit devoted to medical research. Yet the work avoids reducing regeneration to optimism. Fire, loss, repetition, and repair remain inseparable.

Life and Love and Nothing turns the landscape from a view into an event.

Sarkissian's broader practice consistently tests that transformation. Landscapes become simulations, images become executions, and digital instructions become marks in physical materials. Across these shifts, his work retains an attention to light and place while asking how much of an image can change before its emotional identity disappears.

Bibliography

The references cited in this essay are listed below. For the complete bibliography see the Nat Sarkissian links page ↗.