Lucien Smith Drops First NFT Collection ‘Seeds’

Lucien Smith is famous in his 20s for his process-based abstractions drawn with a fire extinguisher. The artist released his first series of NFTs in a collection called Seeds. The collection is currently being marketed through Lobus. It`s an artist asset management company that recently brought in Smith to run its Cultural Innovation Lab.

The Cultural Innovation Lab will work with elite artist clients to help them adapt to the digital age. Seeds NFTs collection is a kind of proof of concept for the types of assistance Lobus can provide.

Sarah Sherrill, co-founder, and co-CEO of Lobus said that NFT is a really powerful platform through which artists can create and connect directly with their community. According to Sarah Sherrill, Lucien Smith had about 200 buyers from his previous practice. With the NFT model, it could reach thousands of people, if not more.

Each Seed NFT looks like a packet of seeds found in a hardware store, with a sort of Warhol-style screen-printing inspired by a recent series of paintings Smith exhibited in an exhibition called Secret Garden at Over the Influence Gallery in Hong Kong.

Like many procedurally generated NFT projects, the Seeds collection is a series of 10,000 algorithmically generated works. Lucien Smith developed various traits and attributes, which were then mixed and matched into unique combinations of varying rarity.

Sarah Sherrill said that the additional technical advances could include a project for which Seed NFT owners can “plant” them on a dedicated Lobus platform and cross-pollinate to create hybrids in a sort of “pick and breed” model that mimics the gameplay of collecting.

Offers of such a kind are examples of digitized projects that Lucien Smith might not have been able to complete without the technical support that Lobus strives to provide to other artists. Sarah Sherrill said they’re really focused on working with artists who have a physical background who want to go digital, creators with brand equity who want to protect and infiltrate the web3 environment.

When asked why artists choose Lobus and not another platform, Sherrill replied that there is a reason why you don’t see Bottega Veneta on Amazon. Or, in other words, they understand how important it is for an artist to keep their brand identity in those initial drops.

By offering exclusive deals from renowned artists, Lobus hopes to become a go-to platform for the art world’s elite. The strategy seems to be working.  DJ Diplo, influencer Zach Bia, and music industry insider Brock Korsan show off their newly released Seed NFTs on social media.

Lucien Smith is a contemporary American painter. His series of Rain Paintings are created using paint-filled fire extinguishers and are considered a typical example of what critics dubbed zombie formalism in the early 2010s.

Lucien Smith creates work that spans the full range of styles and interests, occasional to purpose, lean to rich, sublime to conventional. Lucien Smith is a multidisciplinary artist.  After receiving a degree in fine arts, his abstract paintings brought him international recognition. After what seemed like instant success, Smith struggled with some of the pitfalls associated with such early exposure.

It was during this period that Smith founded Serving the People, a non-profit organization whose mission is to provide opportunities and support for young artists. Lobus, a wealth management company focused on artists and collectors, has appointed Smith as director of its Cultural Innovation Lab, a position that will allow him to bring artists to blockchain technology to manage their assets.