NOBLE INTENTIONS
”I am trying, bit by bit, to bring back my findings from the rawest moments I live, where I really feel life. In all of its earnestness, all of its emotion, and in the attempt.”
Sam Spratt’s first attempt at art was painting brown paper bags for a college assignment. “It was the first time I’d ever taken anything seriously,” he remembers. “But that one tiny little thing put me on a technical path of art making.”
After school, Sam got a job with a tech blog making $20 an illustration, with a link to his website included in any article that used his material. That opened doors. Pretty soon, he was in New York with a successful career creating album covers and other commercial art.
By late 2020, he realized he had compromised his own artistic vision in the name of commercial success. He came across the young FEWOCiOUS – who got into digital art as a result of seeing Sam’s work – and exposed Sam to NFTs through his own. “I got to have this beautiful loop of someone so much younger than me who figured out a really quintessential part of life and about what being an artist really is before I did.”
Sam, creator of ‘Luci,’ is largely a digital artist whose technique is born from his past as an oil painter. He loves the ease and speed with which art can be created in this new medium, although he labors over each piece, starting with a wash, laying in a sketch, and bringing in light and shade, bits of color, texture, and detail. He shares: “This is what I spend all my time on. This is where the story lies. This is where the energy lies. And, I can think of no more noble goal than to spend energy to preserve our reflected reality to each other.”
Sam’s successful ‘Luci’ series is about the rediscovery of our most ancient human values. He attributes his “coming back to life as an artist and feeling more human” to the time and energy he has been able to expend on his own creativity. “Learning from new ways of doing things is an essential part of the circle of life for me; the idea of being able to learn from all collective human knowledge and history is exciting.”
Sam explains: “When philosophy, religion, art, and science start colliding with each other, great new things are formed. Just like that of art and finance, markets, and code – from these new, beautiful things start to form. I am trying, bit by bit, to bring back my findings from the rawest moments I live, where I really feel life. In all of its earnestness, all of its emotion, and in the attempt.”
The desire to pull down the old order, rather than use it for new learnings, is the most universal of human mistakes and not one Sam is about to make.
