Arlo Sinclair

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Arlo Sinclair

Nerd turned artist painting a blend of obsolete tech and today's digital dilemmas w/ a dash of humour

06/08/2026

Opening tonight.

Very excited to be showing two new original wall sculptures with BSMT Gallery at the world-famous Saatchi Gallery as part of MATERIALITY.

The Private View is now sold out, which is both amazing and slightly dangerous for anyone trying to look calm in public.

I’ll be exhibiting two unique 1/1 pieces:

Superman: Big Tech
100 x 100cm

Batman: Unresolved Trauma
70 x 70cm

Both pieces sit somewhere between childhood mythology and adult suspicion. The heroes we grew up with, reloaded through the world we now live in: power, technology, trauma, branding, nostalgia, and the strange things we still choose to believe in.

Huge thank you to BSMT Gallery for including me in such an incredible show.

MATERIALITY
Saatchi Gallery, London
6 August–12 September 2026

If you’re coming tonight, come and say hello. I’ll be the one pretending this is all very normal. 💾

01/08/2026

Where did you find your people? 💾⭐️

30/07/2026

Thoughts?

27/07/2026

Using Photoshop for the first time felt slightly indecent.

Not in any dramatic, criminal sense. More in the quiet realisation that reality, which had previously seemed stubbornly fixed, could now be nudged, cleaned up, rearranged and generally persuaded to behave a little better. A shadow removed. A face improved. A truth adjusted.

At first, image manipulation carried a faint whiff of deception. Something slightly suspect. Then, almost without anyone formally announcing it, it became normal. Standard practice. Not the exception but the workflow. The polished image no longer raised suspicion, it simply became the expected version. Reality turned into a rough draft, and software took on the role of final editor.

Photoshop doesn’t merely alter pictures. It alters expectation. It changes the baseline. Once enough perfected images enter circulation, the unedited version starts to look wrong, unfinished, strangely careless.

That’s a powerful thing to do to a culture. Especially one already prone to comparison, self-surveillance and low-grade dissatisfaction.

It’s just a tool. But tools still shape behaviour, and behaviour shapes standards, and before long you’ve got entire populations measuring themselves against surfaces that were never real in the first place.

This piece isn’t anti-Photoshop. It’s enabled extraordinary things. But that’s often the trouble with powerful tools. They don’t arrive wearing a moral label. They simply expand what is possible, and then the culture decides what to do with that expansion.

Often, what the culture decides is “make everyone feel slightly inadequate and then sell them things.” A surprisingly durable business model.

Still, I can’t help admiring the audacity of it all. The fact that with enough technical finesse, a photograph can be steered away from reality and into something more aspirational, more sellable, more emotionally manipulative.

Which is, in its own way, a form of magic.
Dark magic, perhaps. But magic. 💾

What are your thoughts on Photoshop?

Oil on canvas | 70x70cm | Unique 1/1

23/06/2026

1.11 Geek Chic

There was a time when liking computers was not considered a viable route to glamour.

Difficult to believe now, I know, in an age where every mediocre founder with a quarter-zip and a podcast face is treated like he’s midway through delivering the stone tablets. But in the earlier days, being deeply into technology was often coded as awkward, obsessive, and slightly tragic. Still, there was something quietly noble about it too. Because long before tech became cool, some people were already trying to make it beautiful.

That’s one of the things I’ve always admired about companies like Apple and Amiga. They understood, earlier than most, that if computers were going to move from specialist tools to everyday companions, they couldn’t just function. They had to seduce. They had to invite. They had to signal that this machine belonged not just to accountants, hobbyists and engineers, but to ordinary people who might want a little elegance with their processing power.

It changed what technology looked like. But it also changed what it meant to be into it. Gradually, the machine stopped being merely useful and started becoming expressive. Aesthetic. Cultural. Part of a lifestyle, if you want to use the language I’m usually suspicious of but reluctantly admit applies here. The geek didn’t disappear. He got a better haircut and some brand alignment.

It’s about the point where geek culture starts slipping from subculture into style. Where the things that once marked you out as strange begin, slowly, to become badges of taste. But still, there’s something satisfying in watching a culture once dismissed as niche become central enough to shape design, fashion, media and the broader idea of modernity itself.

I suppose that’s partly personal for me too. Because technology was once one of the things that made many of us feel outside the room. Later, it became one of the things that gave us a place in it. This piece is a nod to the moment geek culture began slipping from subculture into style.

Just one that started in a slightly dusty computer room.

Geek Chic [ Oil on Canvas 1/1 — 2022 ]

20/06/2026

One of the things I miss about early games is how much they left unsaid. Or rather, unshown.

Modern games are so determined to prove what they can do that they often leave very little space for your imagination to misbehave in useful ways. But in the 8-bit era, the limitations were the magic. A few pixels, a handful of colours, a melody that sounded as though it had been composed inside a toaster, and somehow your brain did the rest.

That was certainly true of the princess.

Characters like Peach existed in that odd early space between icon and blank canvas. We knew what role she played, but not much else. She was less a person than a promise. A reward. A vague digital ideal waiting somewhere beyond the level design. Looking back, that’s both charming and a little suspect. The “damsel in distress” trope was doing a lot of heavy lifting in those games, and even as a kid I was dimly aware, thanks largely to the strong women who brought me up, that there was something slightly lazy about how often female characters were reduced to things that needed rescuing.

Partly because the limitations forced you to collaborate with the machine. You weren’t given the whole image. You had to complete it. That act of imagination made the characters feel oddly personal, as though your own mind had helped finish the work. I think that’s one reason those games still hold such emotional power. They didn’t simply show us a world. They let us help build one.

This piece sits in that contradiction: nostalgia, critique, and affection for the weird efficiency of old games. It’s about what those systems gave us, but also what they quietly taught us. How to fill gaps. How to project meaning. How to accept certain roles without questioning who had written them and why.

Which, when you put it like that, sounds less like game design and more like growing up. 💾

Extra context:
The 8-bit era of gaming was shaped by severe technical limits in graphics, sound and memory. Rescue-the-princess plots became one of the most common narrative devices of the period, reflecting both the simplicity and the gender assumptions of early game design.

17/06/2026

📲 Smartphones ruined boredom. Agree/Disagree?

16/06/2026

I can still picture my grandfather’s shed.

The smell hit first: wood shavings, oil, old tools, the general scent of practical competence. Then I saw it. Sitting there on the bench like a small miracle rescued from a skip was a battered Commodore 64 he’d found, fixed, and decided should be mine. For a child who would endlessly daydream about computers he couldn’t afford, it may as well have been a spacecraft. I was nine years old and utterly gone.

People sometimes talk about technology as though they arrived at it through strategy, or talent, or a carefully considered professional calling. I arrived at it the way many kids arrive at the things that later define them: through obsession, luck, and not having enough money to do it properly. We couldn’t afford games. For a while, we couldn’t even afford a tape deck to save anything I made. Which meant that if I wanted the machine to do something interesting, I had to learn how to tell it what to do.

10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD!”

It’s a ridiculous phrase, really. Friendly. Useless. But for me it was a threshold. A first proper glimpse of a world in which language could create behaviour. You typed a thing. The machine obeyed. No ambiguity. No sarcasm. No social politics. Just clean logic and immediate consequence. As a kid who found human beings considerably harder to decode, I was very taken with that arrangement.

This piece is about that beginning. Not just the start of programming. It’s about what technology represented to me before it became ordinary. Possibility. Escape. Order. Imagination. A different route through life than the one visible around me. It’s also about the people who quietly change everything without ever announcing themselves as heroes. My grandfather never gave me a lecture about the future. He just fixed a discarded machine and put it in front of a kid who needed somewhere for his mind to go.

That turned out to be enough.

08/06/2026

Insurrection v2.0

Commission complete and headed to Paris. Unique. Oil on canvas 70x70cm. 💾

Address

London

Website

http://www.arlosinclair.com/

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