It’s difficult being an artist that also wants to collect, given that you’re not coming from a trader or investor kind of portfolio and your art income is very much a chunk of your livelihood. That said, there’s a few artists I’ve taken the time to collect repeatedly. Choosing who to talk about and who to wait on sometimes hurts feelings, so if I don’t cover your art here and we are friends or mutual collectors - take heart, I’ll get to you. I’m going to try to not just showcase what I like, but explain why I like it and why I think it has worth.

1. Miguel aka Mig (@nftbromi)

   https://objkt.com/profile/migmig/created

   Miguel is mostly on Tezos, but I have a piece by them on dartroom.xyz as well that I love. We both do a lot of art that is mostly shapes and occasionally squiggles. You would think that restricting yourself to mostly shapes would mean that all the art starts to look the same from one artist to the next, but Miguel has a few signature moves that make his art feel fresh and unique even within those restrictions.

His use of repeated shapes creates something more like blocks of form than strict objects, so that a square isn’t just a square but a squarish movement in one part of his composition. By using gradients constantly, each shape is also not just a flat element stacked on others, but suggests depth that’s contradicted immediately by the flat stacking technique. That is, if you look - it feels both 3D and aggressively flat at the same time, and the final effect is a kind of airy indifference to questions like “what would this look like as a sculpture.”

One of the interesting things about the squiggle and its apparent birth in memphis style design is that it takes the rigid structural certainty of geometric primitives and throws a completely expressive element into it. Add to this Mig’s color selections and you start to see a body of work that walks the line between playful and serious. You can see his designs continue to develop too - usually portrait dimensions, and with each new design something new and something familiar: can’t frame it with a simple rectangle each time, the stroke goes in the middle because it feels right - but this time it’s stacked, this time it curves around a sphere, this time it ducks behind a shape. I have no idea what Mig has in mind as his “rules” as he’s creating, but seeing the rules get observed and then transgressed in turn has led to an exciting collection that I love to own but could also use as desktops or could imagine printing out.

2. Bilnd (@BilndArt)

I don’t own very much Bilnd art, but I have bought a couple pieces on Eth. I’ve found that one thing I really enjoy is watching fellow strict abstract artists that struggle with the rigor of geometric abstraction and hard edge aesthetics but also want to explore more radical abstract expressionism that dispenses with all that. Usually I find people who want to do both have better compositions.

See, for example, how these two radically different compositions and styles have a similar feeling that’s hard to articulate:

The limited and deliberate palettes make the art come together in both of these - the clear direction of composition having a focus and a negative space help you to settle on what the art is saying. Personally, I struggle with trying to have authentic looking brush strokes using digital tools. One thing you may notice the longer you stare at digital art is that you can eventually recognize (mostly) who is using tools like ProCreate: the brush strokes look the same. You can tell who is using brushes in photoshop: the strokes don’t differentiate well and you can see brush pattern stacking. Does it take you out of the illusion? If it does, I submit that’s a good reason to not enjoy someone’s work. If the illusion is maintained or somehow enhanced by the digital technique that’s a victory in my view.

I think Bilnd does an incredible job of using deliberate palettes that are reminiscent of Swiss Modern design of the 1950s/1960s and geometric styles that look as at home in his collections as they would in a design museum - triumphs of simplicity and restraint.

Consider the below example of a piece that is utterly simple - 5 colors. The shapes look iconic without feeling like he’s just pulling from a WingDings font. The texture over the whole piece suggests it is aged - this is a design artifact from a world where the simplicity of that era was never actually as consistently good as Bilnd’s art is.

3 . Polyforms (@polyforms_)

If you’ve noticed a theme - it’s that these artists are doing similar things to what I like to do. Polyforms is no exception, and his work treads that difficult space of combining complex eye-candy textures with simplicity and form-based compositions. Polyforms’ designs make you ask this question: could he add anything more and make it better? His best work always leaves you thinking that he reached the exact point where more shapes would just be cluttering up the screen where you want to instead take in the detail.

If you’re feeling in the mood for something even simpler, just like Bilnd you can see Polyforms going back and forth between the stark simple shapes and more complex arrangements. Maybe this is just a signature of artists I tend to like - but I don’t see how an artist can completely explore radical abstraction without dipping into the different poles. This, unfortunately, does mean that some platforms will question an artist’s commitment to style. It’s a Catch-22: a sincere artist, in my estimation, will feel compelled to try different things in the balance between total expression and using universal things like geometric primitives - but that very exploration makes their collection varied and not as marketable as a consistent body of work.

I also happen to own a few of Polyforms NFTs from early Polygon days. I don’t buy lots of animations, but you can see how the combination of simplicity and glitched details makes these pieces stand out:

I should also note that Polyforms is worthwhile to explore because he keeps a nice website: https://polyforms.io/ where he interviews other artists about their methods. Solid questions that help you understand the process of everyone he speaks with. That curiosity by itself is an indicator that Polyforms isn’t just making decorative art with the most immediate tools at hand - but is deeply interested in the way other people are making things and what they think when they make them.

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If people are into it I’ll do future installments of my art picks. I hope walking through these three artists has helped you find something exciting.