The Happy Medicine: Bryan Brinkman's Colorful Pop Art

By @JustinWetch

In college, Bryan Brinkman submitted a painting to a student art show as “kind of a joke”. It was a stick figure in underwear scratching its head, hung alongside ornate, serious, carefully considered works. 

The wife of the university president saw it. "I love this. How much?"

Bryan had never priced art before. Someone suggested $200. She paid it on the spot. He has no idea where that painting is now. The university doesn't even exist anymore. But the lesson stuck.

"The audience you think you're making art for is not always the real audience. A lot of people in that show were trying to make very serious, powerful works, and in the end, this goofy little cartoon painting resonated more than the serious pieces."

Bryan grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, messing around in Microsoft Paint before discovering Adobe software and Cinema 4D in high school. By fifteen or sixteen he was making short animations for Newgrounds, the pre-YouTube hub for Flash cartoons and games that functioned as both proving ground and meat grinder for young creators.

Newgrounds had a five-star rating system, and if your animation scored under two stars, they deleted it. Probably to save server space, but it created a Darwinian pressure that shaped how Bryan learned to make things.

"It was kind of a fun challenge of like, how do I get enough stars to survive?"

The answer was: make it quick, make it funny, make it weird enough to hold attention. The early stuff was rough, the community told him so, but the environment rewarded speed and humor over polish. A lot of what came out of that era became memes before most people even knew what memes were.

One of the animators he met through Newgrounds told him about the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Bryan flew out, liked what he saw, and enrolled.

After college Bryan moved to New York, worked at an ad agency, then got noticed by a character designer from the HBO animated series The Life and Times of Tim. He contributed remotely, got flown to LA when the show was renewed, wore every hat they'd let him wear. The show got canceled again after that season, and he went back to New York.

Then came late night.

A temporary fill-in role on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon turned into eight years, stretching through the transition to The Tonight Show. Over 1,500 episodes, daily deadlines, constant style-switching. One day he'd be drawing a fake Dr. Seuss cover, the next animating a Dora the Explorer parody.

"It's very fun to see something you created that day air on TV that same night. In previous jobs, projects would take months before anyone saw the result, so this was a rush."

For a stretch he was also doing visual effects for Saturday Night Live, which meant working Friday nights and all day Saturday to finish shots in time for the live broadcast. He came out exhausted but vastly more capable.

"After eight years of that, I was a little exhausted and needed a break, but it made me a much more well-rounded artist."

Around 2019, while still juggling both shows, Bryan started experimenting with NFTs. He did drops on SuperRare, Nifty Gateway, Art Blocks, learning the mechanics of a new art economy that hadn't existed when he'd started in the industry.

Then one of his pieces resold on the secondary market for several thousand dollars. Someone had paid real money, not to Bryan, but to another collector, just to own his work. That signaled something.

"If people believed in my art that much, and I wasn't putting 100% of my effort into it, it felt insincere."

He did the math. A year of NFT drops had roughly matched his annual salary. He had enough savings for a runway. If it didn't work out, he could knock on doors and find TV work again. But if it did work out, he'd have the thing every art school kid dreams about: complete creative autonomy.

He quit. It worked out. He's about six years into the independent artist life now.

Bryan's art is bright, colorful, and fun at first glance. Candy for the eyes. But there's usually something else underneath.

"I want to talk about harder subjects sometimes, but I don't want to bring people down. If someone looks at a piece for a second they might go, oh, that's fun, and if they choose to dive deeper, they'll find the deeper meaning."

He made a piece about how people gamble with digital art, not exactly a cheerful message, but wrapped in playful visuals so the critique goes down easier. He weaves recurring symbols and color motifs through his work, creating connections across pieces that reward close attention. The surface is dopamine. The depth is optional but present.

"I enjoy that dual aspect, happy/sad, fun/difficult, running through most of my work."

Nimbuds was an Art Blocks project Bryan made with his friend and SNL coworker Manny Morales. Bryan had been telling Manny about NFTs for months, and once he showed him how generative on-chain art worked, they decided to collaborate.

The concept evolved from earlier pieces Bryan had made, clouds with wires, soft shapes with unexpected textures. As they developed Nimbuds they started adding faces, and Bryan became fascinated by how much expression you could wring from almost nothing.

"It really came down to where the pupils rest within a circle, the bend of the mouth, and the angles of the eyebrows. Just randomizing those three things can give you an insecure, upset face or an angry, devilish face."

Nimbuds sold out in minutes. Then Ringers and Fidenza came out, Art Blocks exploded, and Bryan was already on the ride.

He followed up with NimTeens, a playful sequel imagining the cloud creatures as awkward high schoolers. But he flipped the usual PFP logic: the prettiest versions were the most common, while the rarest ones had pimples, braces, and bad mustaches. A gentle subversion of the rarity game everyone else was playing straight.

These days Bryan works in thematic cycles. His current theme is called Somebody/Nobody, an exploration of the internal seesaw every artist knows.

"Some days I feel like somebody, some days I feel like nobody. And a lot of that is entirely internal, in my head."

It's not an external reality, just those internal feelings artists battle with. The phrase captures the dichotomy.

He made a neon sign piece that randomly displays one word or the other when it loads, switching every fifteen minutes. A nod to Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame, rendered as a flickering binary.

He's also running Brinkworks, a patronage model where 100 collectors prepaid for a year of his art. They hold soulbound passes, burnable for a prorated refund if they want out. Only one person has burned so far. Each quarter Bryan releases editions and lets the collectors choose which ones they want, letting supply find itself organically.

What does he wish people understood about his work?

"My work tends to be bright and positive, and some might overlook it because of that. But I think over time people will see what I'm building."

Bryan shouts out the artists and collectors who helped him early: @Coldie, @thesarahshow, @pranksy, Alotta Money, @MattKaneArtist, Josie Bellini, @niftytime (who became his Nifty Gateway producer), and @ekaitza_ (who produced his first drop there). He also leans on collector friends like Benny @redbeardnft, @RogerDickerman, @AdamTastic, and @RaptorNews3.

Artists inspiring him lately:@PanterXhita, whose patronage project The Twelve directly inspired Brinkworks; @emilyxxie, for how she's grown and articulated her vision; and @cemhah, whose recent SuperRare show combined traditional animation with AI tools and fiber optic prints that blew his mind.

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Bryan recommends @Jen_Stark, @killeracid ("the reason I found the NFT space"), and @lovidlovid.