←
CATALOGUE
Blog

Bryan Brinkman: A Squeegee That Never Stops Painting

Bryan Brinkman's Squeegee, which debuted at the Art Blocks Artists Fair in Marfa, lays down dots and piped lines of paint and drags a blade through them every 10 seconds, fully on chain on Ethereum.

••

Bryan Brinkman brought a new work to Marfa, Texas. Squeegee debuted on October 24 at the Art Blocks Artists Fair, where Brinkman ran a booth with his family, and went public online the next day as an edition of 100, fully on chain on Ethereum mainnet. "This piece is an infinitely random plot of paint which is spread out with random arcs by a squeegee," he wrote. "This then resets and paints anew every 10 sec."

Each painting starts on a sheet of textured cream paper. Dots and piped lines of paint are drawn at random: dot grids in rainbow rows, confetti, checkerboards, waves and diagonal stripes, plus bead chains, squiggles, dashes and loose blobs, each claiming its own patch so nothing collides. The lines are rendered like piped icing with an imperfect squeeze, thin where the tube let up and bulging where it pushed out extra. Then the blade comes through and smears everything it meets, and the code snaps the carried paint toward the nearest pure color of the palette "so streaks stay bold and saturated instead of averaging into pastel mud."

The work is also a tool. Double tap and Creative Mode opens: a quick click lays a dot, holding in place makes it grow, holding and dragging pipes a line, and you can pull the squeegee through your own composition by hand. On October 26 Brinkman shared an easter egg: press "p" to turn any design on screen into a paint by number print. The first painting of each token is seeded from its mint, so every edition has its own fixed composition before the loop moves on to new ones.

Squeegee was made with ABX, the open source protocol from Art Blocks for putting digital objects on chain, and Brinkman thanked ABX "for helping me put this on-chain." It caps a busy month for him: on October 20 he released the Brinkman Art Companion app for iOS, with galleries for iPads, AR 3D sculptures, AR print animations and Apple Watch time pieces, and on October 22 he posted that his art now shows "on this crazy screen nightly in London." As the work's own page puts it: leave it running and it keeps making new ones.

Sources

← All storiesHome →