Tyler Hobbs Facts

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Tyler Hobbs is an artist from Austin, Texas, US. He is best known for his artwork generated with custom algorithms. He is often said to be a painter who paints with code.

Facts About Tyler Hobbs

  • Although he always wanted to become an artist, Tyler Hobbs studied Computer Science at the University of Texas in Austin.
  • As a child, he loved to draw, paint, and play with LEGO and Play-Doh.
  • He started to learn computer programming at the age of 14, inspired by his older brother.
  • He worked as a software engineer for a tech startup but he continued to draw and paint as a hobby in his spare time.
  • In an effort to combine his work (computer programming) and his passion (art), he decided to write a program that would create a painting.

Often, computer generated art is cold and mathematical. I strive to express my feelings and sensations through the work, rather than focusing on its mathematical properties.

Tyler Hobbs
  • This approach or art production technique is often referred to as generative art, and Tyler Hobbs often calls himself a generative artist.
  • Tyler Hobbs enjoys playing the drums. At high school, he was the drummer in several punk bands.
  • He is a keen skateboarder and tries to go skateboarding several times a week.

I think I’m known in particular for finding good mixtures of the computer and the human, the structured and the chaotic, in my work.

Tyler Hobbs
  • Before he started to create and sell NFT artwork, he was working as an artist, selling prints through his website as well as continuing to work as a software engineer in Austin, Texas.
  • His first NFT drop was Fidenza in June 2021.
  • One of the first NFTs Tyler Hobbs bought was a sub-scape by Matt Doloria through Art Blocks. Art Blocks is a platform based on Ethereum that allows artists to write a program to the blockchain that generates the artwork in JavaScript. A purchaser can click the mint button which will trigger the script to be run and a new piece of artwork will be created as an NFT. Neither the collector nor the artist knows exactly what the newly-minted NFT will look like.
  • Tyler Hobb’s Fidenza used the Art Blocks platform. The number of mints was fixed to 999.
  • Tyler Hobbs says his biggest influences are traditional painters. Kandinsky paintings, for example, inspired the colour palette and the use of negative space in Fidenza.
  • He is also inspired by the work of Cezanne and Mark Rothko.

A lot of artists say that constraints yield creativity. Generative art is kind of a way of thinking very carefully about those constraints.

Tyler Hobbs
  • Tyler Hobbs compares generative art to jazz music. Both have a series of standards and structures, but they allow space for improvisation. He says his work blends order and chaos.
  • He is a fan of the jazz musicians Miles Davis, and Jack Wilkins.
  • His favorite drummers are Tony Williams and Mel Lewis.

Every year, we spend more and more of our time with our computers. It’s so important for us to integrate computers into our way of creating artwork in order to set up a healthy digital society.

Tyler Hobbs