Amber Vittoria

Amber Vittoria is an artist, poet and author, born in 1990, who came up as a commercial illustrator and turned herself into a full time painter. After graduating in 2012 she took design and illustration work for clients including Victoria's Secret, VaynerMedia and Avon, and later NBC, Warby Parker, Gucci, The New York Times and Instagram. In 2017 she moved back toward painting, first for friends and then for collectors, and in 2020 Forbes named her to its 30 Under 30 list in Art and Style. Her first brush with crypto was accidental: in 2018 she drew cat features for CryptoKitties without understanding that they were NFTs. She returned deliberately in early 2021, bought CryptoPunks with her savings and began selling her own work on MakersPlace. Her Inaugural Collection was followed by Final Forms, The Alphabet Collection and, in July 2022, Memories of a Masterpiece, 999 scans of hand cut paper layouts that traded around 100 ETH in its first day. She has moved steadily away from one of one orthodoxy toward open and limited editions she keeps available indefinitely, an approach she describes as anti hype and anti speculation. Her book These Are My Big Girl Pants came out with Andrews McMeel in 2023. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

Vittoria works in ink, colored pencil, acrylic and acrylic gouache on Strathmore mixed media paper, plus hand cut paper collage that she scans rather than glues down. Her compositions are built from ribbons and bands of wet, blended color, often finished with thin graphite marks and short lines of her own poetry. Digitally she draws in Photoshop and Illustrator using a trackpad on purpose, because the imprecision leaves the wobble she wants. Named bodies of work include Final Forms, The Alphabet Collection, Memories of a Masterpiece, Folding and Unfolding, and the open edition Everywhere.

• Memories of a Masterpiece, 999 scanned hand cut paper works released July 2022
• The Alphabet Collection, 26 letters in 10 palettes
• Final Forms, a 50 piece set about aging
• Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art and Style, 2020
• Passersby, an illustrated poem commissioned by WePresent in 2021
• Author of These Are My Big Girl Pants (Andrews McMeel, 2023)
• Public advocate for true open editions over speculative timed drops

On the show