{"id":778551,"date":"2026-07-03T22:31:39","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T22:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/778551\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T22:31:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T22:31:39","slug":"falling-under-the-map-sasha-yazovs-airbrush-art-of-the-sims-turns-pixels-to-paint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/778551\/","title":{"rendered":"Falling under the map: Sasha Yazov\u2019s airbrush art of The Sims turns pixels to paint"},"content":{"rendered":"

The contemporary airbrush scene is quite fascinating. In the 70s, James Rosenquist\u2019s Marilyn would use stencils and collage aesthetics in a fine art setting, whereas H.R Giger would become a household name through his nightmarish metalscapes, realised through the tool\u2019s potential for realistic textures and burnished gradients. It\u2019s what makes us nostalgic for old-school advertising, if it\u2019s for cigarettes<\/a> or the iconic movie posters of Drew Struzan.<\/a> Somewhere along the way, one can notice that this little process of blowing paint onto a page lends itself particularly well for the cartoonish, the fantastical, the unreal \u2013 in fact, Georgia-based artist Sasha Yazov<\/a> was one of the first of the new wave of airbrush painters to approach the unique world of video game aesthetics with the often overlooked practice.<\/p>\n

Like many artists, Sasha was obsessed with video games as a kid, drawing scenes and characters from games and cartoons from memory, even in kindergarten. Later on as a teenager, Sasha became enamoured with the styles of R\u016bt\u00e9 Merk and Alex Colville<\/a>, the latter of which long predates the aesthetic of low polygon characters and the low-res fuzziness of early 3D video games. \u201cBack then, not many people were using airbrush the way it\u2019s used now in contemporary painting and at some point I realised it was the perfect tool for rendering digital artefacts on a canvas,\u201d says Sasha. Artefacts is a great word for it, because Sasha\u2019s paintings feel like explorations into the long-gone, dead servers of our childhood gaming worlds \u2013 these games\u2019 aesthetics are a driving factor in our cultural nostalgia for 2000s computer games. Compared to the vibrant and massively popular worlds of today\u2019s Fortnite, where hundreds of moving images can co-exist at once on-screen, games like The Sims, Morrowind or miscellaneous life simulators feel strangely barren, haunted even.<\/p>\n