2026-07-27 Morning Scan

Cast: Chris Follows Excel mesh painting thread

Thread

@chrisfollows pushed acrylic through perforated aluminum mesh for seventeen years. Then his London studio became luxury flats, his mesh supplier went bankrupt, and his paint supplier closed. His latest work is a 24-sheet Microsoft Excel workbook.

The mesh paintings worked like this: push paint through holes in aluminum mesh, let it dry, punch out sections, push a new color through. Layer by layer. He worked from behind the mesh and never saw the image until he flipped it over.

Then London priced out his studio. The mesh manufacturer folded. Spectrum Paints, the only brand with the right drying time, closed. Three separate material supply chains gone.

He rebuilt the practice in Blender, then VR, then AI trained on his own output. Each phase a translation of the same gesture: push something through a grid and see what accumulates.

Now Excel. Twenty-four sheets. Each cell is a hole. The gridlines are the mesh. The workbook is the wall. The same structure accountants use for quarterly earnings becomes a surface for compositions that grew out of billboard materials in the 1990s.

The tool does not matter. The constraint does. Every time a material was taken away the practice survived by finding the next available grid.

Context

Chris Follows is a UK-based multidisciplinary artist and Emerging Technologies Lead at University of the Arts London. His mesh painting practice began in 1998, evolved through physical → digital → VR → AI phases, and has now landed in Microsoft Excel as a generative surface. The 24-sheet workbook posted today to /cryptoart continues a 25-year exploration of pushing material through grids.

Channels Scanned

/cryptoart, /art, /genart, /degen-art