Sam Spratt

Sam Spratt is an American artist best known for his computer-generated paintings. Over the past decade he has become a leading name in the world of digital illustration.

Spratt, who lives and works in New York, has made artwork for magazines including Rolling Stone, Variety and Der Speigel, as well as the musicians Donald Glover, Kid Cudi, and Ty Dolla Sign. He has also designed comics for Marvel and worked on graphics for computer games including Angry Birds, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Tomb Raider.

In October 2021, after nearly a year of preparation, Spratt unveiled his first NFTs; a series of digital paintings paired with psalms called Luci. Released episodically, they tell the dystopian story of a primate of the same name.

The release of the first six digital paintings, spread across three chapters of Luci, generated sales of nearly $1 million.

The seventh work in the series was sold by Christie’s in June 2022. It was offered as lot number one in an online sale of NFTS to benefit the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. It achieved $252,000, more than three times its low estimate. The 27-lot sale in total raised over $1.5 million for charity.

According to Spratt, the digital paintings in Luci act as a bridge between the world of NFTs and physical fine art. This echoes his own artistic journey, having started out as a classically-trained oil painter.

‘I have a traditional background and love the texture, the feel, all of the uniqueness that makes an oil painting,’ he said in 2021. He added that he was eventually drawn to digital art because ‘you could feel that these things are just going to bleed into each other.’