Getting hands-on with the Paintbox is like lifting the hood on 80s visual culture. Its distinctive colors, its signature style, the very limits of what was possible – these weren't just technical specs; they were like the laws of a new visual universe, ones that both liberated and directed the artists and designers of the era. As artists, we're always working within constraints, whether it's the pull of gravity or the structures of the art world. But what truly surprised me about the Paintbox wasn't so much its limitations, but its striking familiarity. Its operational language felt incredibly close not just to modern tools like Photoshop, but to the very essence of working with physical paint.
ArtMeta, in collaboration with Tezos and Rhizome, has pulled off an ambitious resurrection – reviving not only the firmware but the entire original ethos. The original Paintbox famously invited artists like Keith Haring and David Hockney to experiment with its capabilities, and it's precisely this enduring spirit of playful exploration that led me to Rhizome World at 11am on a rainy Sunday morning in NY.
Before digital creativity became ubiquitous, nestled on every phone and laptop, there existed a machine that was both technological titan and artistic muse: the Quantel Paintbox. Launched in 1981 for around $250,000 (well over $800,000 in today's money), this wasn't just an evolutionary step in graphics; it was a revolution packed into prohibitively expensive hardware. Its immense cost and rarity inadvertently created a unique historical moment, forging an unprecedented bridge between the burgeoning world of digital effects for mass media and the exploratory realm of fine art, defining the vibrant, layered aesthetic of the 1980s in the process. Now, the "Paintboxed" exhibition project is resurrecting this icon, allowing contemporary artists to touch a pivotal point where pop culture and high art converged on the same digital screen.
Developed by UK broadcast tech specialists, Quantel, the Paintbox was initially aimed at the high-pressure environment of television news. Its brilliance lay in combining powerful (for the time) image processing with an intuitive, artist-designed interface, featuring their industry-first pressure-sensitive stylus and tablet. Suddenly, real-time cut-outs, stenciling, video manipulation, animation, genuine fonts, graphics and digital painting became feasible at broadcast deadline speed. TV stations around the world snapped them up, making the Paintbox the engine behind countless news graphics, weather maps, and station idents.
But its influence rapidly transcended the newsroom, becoming the defining tool for a new wave of pop visual culture created in a digital explosion of video post-production facilities. The slick, futuristic graphics and layered textures that characterised 80s music videos? The Paintbox was often the key. Its handiwork is vividly seen in the groundbreaking Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" video, where it provided the textures and backgrounds for the blocky CGI figures where it overlayed the popping neon colors onto the band members. It wasn't just motion; still images that defined the era bore the 1985 photo quality Paintbox’s digital fingerprints. Iconic album covers like Queen's "The Miracle," Nirvana's grunge-defining "Nevermind," and the Beastie Boys' sample-heavy collage for "Paul's Boutique" were composited and manipulated using its capabilities. Film posters for major releases like "The Silence of the Lambs," "JFK," and "The Doors" achieved their distinctive looks thanks to this machine. The "Paintbox look" – often characterised by vibrant colors, soft edges, airbrushed effects, and seamless compositing – became synonymous with the high-production gloss of the decade's media landscape.
Crucially, this potent tool wasn't confined to commercial studios. Its revolutionary potential attracted the attention of established fine artists, curious about this new medium. This confluence – the same expensive, exclusive technology being used simultaneously for top-40 music videos and avant-garde art creation – marks the Paintbox era as truly unique. It represented a brief, intense period where the tools of commercial visual production and fine art exploration were one and the same, before the democratisation of digital tools via personal computers and software like Photoshop blurred these distinctions into ubiquity.
David Hockney famously embraced the Paintbox in 1985, his explorations captured alongside fellow luminaries like Richard Hamilton (who acquired his own machine), Howard Hodgkin, Sidney Nolan, Larry Rivers, and Jennifer Bartlett in the landmark 1987 BBC series "Painting with Light." This wasn't just dabbling; it was a serious engagement with a new way of seeing and creating. Video art pioneer Nam June Paik incorporated it into his electronic canvases. Keith Haring, working on a Paintbox shortly before his tragic death, was profoundly struck by its implications, famously writing in his journal: "Paintbox has totally revolutionised the notion of art and the image – why hasn’t anyone noticed?" His words capture the excitement and the sense that this machine wasn't merely a tool, but a paradigm shift. Quantel itself leaned into this connection, donating machines to influential art schools, further seeding this crossover between commercial application and artistic experimentation.
The Paintbox facilitated a shared visual language. The techniques used to create a striking album cover could be the same ones employed by Hockney or Hamilton exploring digital mark-making. The ability to layer, manipulate photographic elements, and paint directly onto the screen offered a common ground where the aesthetics of pop culture and fine art could meet and influence each other directly, mediated by this specific, powerful, and scarce technology.
The reign of the dedicated Paintbox hardware was relatively brief. The V-Series arrived in 1989, more compact and slightly less astronomically priced (starting around $80,000), but the advent of powerful desktop computers and sophisticated software like Adobe Photoshop in 1990 signaled the end of an era. Quantel fought patent battles but ultimately couldn't hold back the tide of accessible digital creation. The Paintbox faded from widespread use, still a legendary tool to those who used it but not even on the radar of the public who only ever saw what was created on it. Today, only a precious few remain operational, carefully maintained by a handful of tech enthusiasts and digital artists led by Adrian Wilson.
Adrian Wilson has used a Paintbox since coming across one donated to Blackpool School of Art, where he was studying in 1984, spending the 80s manipulating his photography in ways that were impossible to achieve in the darkroom. Wilson jokes how he “managed to combine three of the least valued creative disciplines of the traditional art world - photography, digital art and video art” but he was well regarded, writing, exhibiting and having his work commissioned by magazines and record companies. Yes, Wilson earned $500 an hour as a freelance commercial Paintbox artist but sitting for hours painting an AT&T commercial frame by frame didn’t fit his personality.
From 1990, Wilson turned his focus back to photography and more conventional art such as graffiti, and opening the first art gallery in Basquiat’s old studio in 2018 but NFTs were to change all that. “Crypto Punks popularized digital art in the same way that The Rolling Stones popularised American Blues. NFTs fuelled an interest in the OG digital artists in the same way that Jagger shone a light towards Muddy Waters.” Wilson pulled his archive out of storage, tracked down a rare working machine and started waving the Paintbox flag at anyone who would notice. In just four years, Wilson has become a focal point for all things Paintbox, owning 6 working machines which he lends out to colleges, bringing together the largest archive of Quantel art & ephemera, including unseen work by David Hockney and Keith Haring, plus curating Paintbox exhibitions for the Sidney Nolan Trust, Computer Arts Society and a video for the Tate Modern.
Wilson’s passion was rewarded by being the only person granted a video interview on the history of the Paintbox by its inventor, Paul Kellar. Wilson’s quest to finally let “everyone notice” the Paintbox’s major contribution to art and cultural history was boosted by the Tezos sponsored “Paintboxed World Tour”, which toured several countries, enabling contemporary artists to use this iconic machine, before landing at Rhizome World in May. Visits to see Wilson demonstrate the Paintbox by staff from MoMA, the Guggenheim and Google Labs are a testament to Michael Connor’s skill at bringing together the freshest of digital visual and performance art together for Rhizome World - even one we can not just see, but have the actual OG Paintbox artist Wilson show us how to use, for the first time in forty years.
This scarcity and historical significance fuel the “Paintboxed World Tour” initiative, co-curated by Wilson and Georg Bak for ArtMeta. Debuting at the Digital Art Mile in Basel (June 16-22), the project is more than technological nostalgia. It's an invitation for contemporary artists to step back into that unique nexus point. By providing access to restored Paintboxes the project allows artists to physically engage with the machine that bridged worlds. The enthusiastic response from invited artists underscores the allure of connecting with this pivotal history. Supported by the Tezos Foundation, the resulting works will be minted as NFTs, creating a dialogue between digital art's pioneering past and its blockchain future, culminating in a global tour and a 2025 retrospective.
