Dimitria: I'm thrilled to be speaking with Adrian Wilson today. Adrian Wilson has been deeply involved in photography as well as with the Quantel Paintbox. Welcome, Adrian. Thanks for joining me.

Adrian: Hi, it's a pleasure.

D: We've been discussing Quantel, and I’ve learned so much over the past months, nearly a year now. I'm excited to dive into this conversation, especially since the Quantel Paintbox holds a sentimental value in your long career in photography. Let’s start from the beginning. Can you tell me how you got involved with the Paintbox and explain who Quantel is?

A: I came from a family of graphic designers and I wanted to take a different path, so I became a photographer, plus it seemed easier and more glamorous than sticking Letraset and glue onto boards. I attended photography at a renowned art college in Blackpool, England just as they had been given a Quantel Paintbox in 1984.

Quantel was founded in 1973, and was known for inventions like the first picture-in-picture and for perfecting framestore technology, which allowed video to be spun around and squeezed into different shapes in real time. In 1981, they launched the Quantel Paintbox, which could perform many functions that Photoshop could only do by 1993, making it way ahead of its time. Unfortunately, despite its capabilities, Paintbox was known mainly by those working  in broadcast TV studios and video post-production houses due to its high price of $250,000.

Left image: “Nevermind” studio album cover by Nirvana (1991) created on the Quantel Paintbox at Electric Paint in LA. Courtesy of UMG. Right image: Film poster of “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991) also created on the Quantel Paintbox by Claudia Fitzpatrick.

In 1986, Quantel released a photo-quality version of the video Paintbox, which became the gold standard in digital manipulation for the next few years, being used to create hundreds of iconic album covers like Nirvana's "Nevermind" and movie posters such as "The Silence of the Lambs." Before Photoshop became widely adopted, the verb in the industry for digitally manipulating photos was actually “Paintboxed”.

Publication of “Paintboxed!” by Paul Jordan.

“Quantel was unique
in that they fostered art.”

Quantel were probably unique in that they employed 50 artists worldwide, involving them in developing new features, plus refining Paintbox’s famously simple user interface, which used the world’s first pressure sensitive pen (another Quantel invention) and required zero computer knowledge. The company knew that Paintbox’s success as a digital art and design studio would depend on the work of artists and designers using it, not just by its advanced technology.

Such was the Paintbox’s success, Quantel didn’t need to rely on celebrity endorsements such as the infamous Amiga launch with Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry because the creative work produced on Paintbox was already, winning dozens of MTV Awards and Emmys for- the world’s most famous music videos and TV shows.

Adrian Wilson Paintbox manipulation of “Money For Nothing” Video by Dire Straits. Courtesy of the artist.

Salespeople didn’t decide on future developments at Quantel - pioneering artists and computer engineers did. This approach made Quantel an amazing company, though because it was primarily used in Broadcast TV, it still remains relatively unknown in the history of digital art. However, the Paintbox really did lay the foundation for our visual digital age, or what has been called the “Photoshop Era”. Paintbox artists in the 80's were often very young and pushed many creative boundaries but have rarely been recognized for introducing us all to screen-based digital art and design, even though Paintbox was launched before Adobe even existed.

As personal computers developed in the 80’s, April Greiman noted that the Mackintosh tried to replicate the higher end Paintbox’s capabilities. Though it predates Apple and was a global standard, Quantel had no interest in becoming a consumer product giant like Sony, Philips, or Adobe and focused on raising the digital bar, rather than just raising profits.

Having said that, even though it cost a quarter of a million dollars, buyers made lots of money from the Paintbox and, such was the demand, hundreds of artists like myself were paid $500 an hour to use one and could pick anywhere in the world to work.

William Lathan created “Mutator” in 1989. All rights reserved by the artist.

In contrast to commercial Paintbox artists working on big budget music videos and commercials, digital media as an art form wasn’t widely appreciated or collected, so fine artists like William Latham faced many more challenges to develop and fund their careers. Ironically, as digital art is now gaining recognition, things have reversed and it is those struggling artists like Molnár, Franke and Mohr whose work is now in demand, rather than the successful Paintbox artist’s work 40 years ago.

Like many artists, I straddled the commercial and fine art worlds, using commissions for digital artwork from advertising agencies and record companies to fund my personal Paintbox work. As a photographer, I felt as instantly freed by the Paintbox to create something that would have been impossible in the camera or darkroom as people do now by typing in an AI prompt. Whatever I imagined could now be easily created and yes, of course that included swapping heads, around 1987, to create sort of a meme.

Adrian Wilson’s meme from 1987. Courtesy of the artist.

Other photographers and artists, such as Inez & Vinoodh and Andreas Gursky would later use the Paintbox to occasionally manipulate images using the Paintbox but I was the first professional photographer to specialise in digital manipulation of my images, from 1985-90.

I had set up in Manchester, England, in a old textile warehouse, paying £15 a week for my studio, working on the Paintbox to do things for any businesses that I could persuade to give my paintboxed photography a try but it was hard. My work in this new field was written about, I was asked to exhibit my work as digital fine art and was commissioned by magazines like Creative Review but it was very hard to make a living and I didn’t want to fall back to being a TV Paintbox artist. Manchester was buzzing with Factory Records and the Hacienda but was still considered a backwater, with less opportunity than in London, which defined me as somewhat of an outsider digital artist in a remote location. I went to New York in 1987 and showed my work to Ogilvy and Mather; to show them the Paintbox photography work I had been doing. They said they had never seen anything like it. Although, I had presumed somebody in America must be already doing what I was,and probably better than some kid from Manchester.

Adrian Wilson, “Perspextive IV”, Paintbox image frame­ grabbed through Perspex, hand tinted and filtered, 1988. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

D: How was your Paintbox work selected as the lead image in the Leonardo magazine (1989 SIGGRAPH Leonardo essay: "Does 'Computer Art' Still Exist?")?

A: To be truthful, I didn't even remember or know about it until digital historian Grant Taylor asked me about it a few years ago.

Adrian Wilson’s 1987 Paintbox art portfolio. Courtesy of the artist.

The Paintbox is unlike other design computers because, as a broadcast TV device, the output was to live video or onto video tape. Quantel could also supply a $40,000 “film recorder”, which would output the image to photographic film or Polaroid and that is what I used to get a first generation hard copy from the Paintbox. These slides were the best way to show potential clients my work because at least they were presented like a traditional photographer’s portfolio, rather than showing a VHS, plus they showed the resolution of the images, with the hallmark Paintbox raster lines which cannot be replicated even today.By 1990, I was given the opportunity to shoot nightclubs around Europe for a living and considered if I wanted to just sit in a dark room looking at a TV screen, or photographing a video wall in a full-on disco full of attractive people in Italy. In my 20s, that was obviously a no-brainer decision. Of course, right now, I sit in front of a screen, photoshopping my photos all day and don’t even go to discos, so that didn't work out (laughs), as I ended up in the same position anyway. I quit working on the Paintbox and put everything in my mom's attic, bless her. 

Adrian Wilson “POST NO NFTS”, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.

Roll on three decades and I am a photographer and graffiti artist in NY. When NFTs came out, I thought, it's a curious idea, so I sprayed over 50 ,"Post No NFTS” stencils around the city instead of "Post No Bills,". not against NFTs per se but because "Post No Bills" is a very old phrase that means don't put a poster on the wall. It's one of those phrases that nobody really thinks of the meaning and the origin of it, but everyone knows what it means. So I thought, oh, okay, ‘Post No NFTs’ is kind of funny because I'm kind of posting on a wall (like Facebook) about something that people are posting online and it does or doesn't exist. It's like Schrödinger's circular cat and a play on the fact of what comes around, always goes around.

Because of the NFT boom it reminded me of my old digital art. So, I called my mom to see if she still had that box in the attic, which thankfully she had and everything has really snowballed from there. 

Adrian Wilson selection of 35mm portfolio slides and detail. Courtesy of the artist.

D: How did you recover the Paintbox images? Was it difficult?

A: Unlike most Paintbox users back in the day, because I saved all my work as slides rather than onto video tape, they are still fresh and vibrant and it was simply a case of digitally scanning the original 35mm slides and my portfolioWhen I look back at these Paintbox works that I did as a student, it's so strange because now Photoshop, apps and AI is so widespread, nobody would think that they were so special. But at the time, they were so amazing, not just because they document the very start of our Photoshop Era but because they are creative artworks, not just digital gimmickry. To be there at the beginning working on a Paintbox at Quantel’s factory, plus the vast paintbox artwork archive that I have collected, to today when I own a rare working Paintbox on which I am creating new animations and artwork is an amazing story.

Left image: David Hockney with the Quantel team while recording “Painting with Light” on June 5th, 1985 |  Right image: Keith Haring using the Quantel Paintbox in 1984. Photo by Tobey Sanford / Disney General Entertainment Content.

The Paintbox is very, very important, culturally important but also part of digital art history. As Keith Haring said, people didn't really know about it, and that includes curators and institutions. For the few people who have heard of it, the paintbox is generally dismissed as a business machine for TV commercials, pop videos, adverts and flying logo news graphics.

“It was looked down on as a commercial machine, but it was a digital artist’s studio.”

Adrian Wilson with Brittnee Zuckerman at DAVID HOCKNEY, INC. Los Angeles. Courtesy of Adrian Wilson.

I've been given so much archive material by others who had boxes of Quantel stuff saved in their attics, some of which I have donated to the Computer History Museum. Among a huge collection of slides that were thrown out by Quantel over the years before it closed down, I amazingly found original Quantel film recorder outputs from the BBC Painting With Light series, broadcast in 1987.  The David Hockney Foundation had never seen these, the artist’s first ever digital art from 1985, which I took to his studio in LA and let them scan them for their archive. There are also unseen Paintbox outputs by Jennifer Bartlett, Howard Hodgkin, Sidney Noland and Larry Rivers.

Installation display at “How Quantel’s Paintbox Changed Our World” with the Computer Arts Society. BCS Moorgate, London. Courtesy of Adrian Wilson.

D: It's absolutely beautiful how much you're putting back into the community. You've done quite a few exhibitions, including your collaboration with the Computer Art Society.

A: It took me a year to find track down a copy of a French film by Paintbox artist Chiara Boeri which predated “Painting With Light” mini-series called “6 Painters and a Computer”, in which she invited artists including Kiki Picasso, Léa Lublin, and Eduardo Arroyo to try the Paintbox for the first time. I premiered the restored video at the well received Computer Arts Society exhibition I curated at the British Computer Society late last year. It was so amazing that all the major artist’s estates gave their blessing to the work being shown at the exhibition, especially as it was the 50th anniversary of Quantel.This year, I co-curated a major Paintbox exhibition at the Sidney Nolan Trust (titled “Painting with Light”, 23 March to 11 May, 2024), lending them unseen artwork and ephemera from my archive and giving a talk on how Nolan fell in love with the Paintbox.

D: You've said it before in another interview, before the Amiga launch, Haring actually flew to Italy for just three days so he can use the paintbox.

A: Unbelievable that nobody picked up on something clearly described in his Journal, right? While researching, I discovered Keith Haring raving about the Paintbox in his Journal after he flew to Rome for three days just to work on one a few months before he passed. It took even longer but I managed to track down the person who invited him to Rome and he has the original output of all Keith’s work. There are over 70 Paintbox artworks and 15 animations that he did, plus video of him working that I have been trying to get permission to exhibit from the Keith Haring Foundation for over a year. They allowed me to show one in my exhibition last year but this is an incredibly unseen part of Keith’s oeuvre that should be shared with the world. Haring went on the Paintbox in 1985, when ABC TV in NY did a short clip about him as an upcoming artist but again, that video and artwork has sadly been kept from public view.

Keith Haring, “Pisa” (1989). ©The Estate of Keith Haring. Courtesy of Andrea De Gioia/Young B&V.

It isn’t all about the famous artists though, I managed to get nearly a hundred pieces of Paintbox art from UK art college students created in 1985, which is a unique snapshot of how digital art was taught back then, plus interviewing people like the late Maureen Nappi about her time creating everything from experimental video art for video walls in NY discos in the early 80’s, to titles for the Max Headroom show on Paintbox. There really is an undiscovered treasure trove of digital art out there awaiting discovery and recognition.

“It  has  totally  revolutionized  the  notion  of art and the image—why hasn’t anyone noticed?”
—Keith Haring, about the Paintbox
(June 29, 1989)

D: It's quite interesting because Keith Haring said that the Paintbox really revolutionised the notion of art and the image - he actually asked why hasn't anyone noticed?

A: Yes, and I also asked the chap who is considered the father of the Paintbox (Paul Kellar), why hasn't anyone noticed? The day I interviewed him, for a Paintbox documentary I am filming, the New York Times had an article about AI going into Photoshop, and the first paragraph from their tech expert stated: “everyone knows Photoshop is the OG of digital manipulation”. I asked Paul if reading that bothered him and he replied? “I don't need somebody to tell me I did it - we did it. If they don't know, that's not my problem.” (...) “When we designed the Paintbox, literally all you needed was a pen because that's what artists use, not a keyboard, not any knowledge of software, nothing. You didn't have to press enter, nothing. Not a mouse that you weren't familiar with, just a pen and a surface. The whole point was for it to be invisible. It was what they call transparent.”

“Once an artist was on it,
you forgot that it was a computer.”

The point being that Quantel did all these things like inventing the pressure sensitive pen to make realistic subtle marks and also set out so that both the creator in the studio and the viewer at home just enjoyed the artwork and the technology wasn’t in the way or obtrusive.It doesn’t help me in terms of raising awareness but it was therefore a measure of Quantel’s success that most people have never even heard of a Paintbox, or its significance but everyone has seen the artwork created on one.

D: How can one see Paintbox works? Is it on a TV screen or through the light box? Because in other exhibitions eg. in “How Quantel’s Paintbox Changed Our World” you've also had some prints.

A: The Paintbox was designed for broadcast TV and the best way to look at the art created is on an old style (CRT) television it was optimised for. Looking at the image on a glass TV screen, the image is smoother and has more vibrant colors than in any other form and that is how it should be viewed. The next best way is to look at one of the output slides because it is an original output and again is viewed as transmitted light. Unlike tape which degrades over time, these are as crisp as the day they were made and are the only direct output format other than video that was recommended by Quantel in the Paintbox User Guide.One common mistake that people make is to compare the Paintbox with conventional computers like the Amiga or Mac. This was a machine with bespoke software and custom made hardware which was incompatible with other computers and had the sole purpose of manipulating and outputting a video feed. A tape or slide isn’t a reproduction, it is the original. When I spoke to the Keith Haring Foundation and told them I had found the art and animations he did, even they asked “Have you got the original files, like the floppy?” because it is what everyone expects but it misses the point.Imagine inventing a whole new area of technology, and then going to somewhere as complex as ABC television or the BBC studios, who've been around for 50 years and have all these wires and machines everywhere, and say, well, actually, I just want to put this new digital machine in between all that other stuff, and it will talk to it all, and it can communicate. The way the Paintbox communicated with everything was via a broadcast quality video feed.The way the Paintbox creates and manipulates the image is very particular and cannot be replicated even now, so these images have the equivalent of having a watermark on paper back in the day. I do like that they have an unattainably authentic quality to them, like Renaissance oil paint hand-mixed from natural pigments. The art itself is super varied too and I created a 3D gallery with hundreds of pieces which show how many different ways artists used the Paintbox. 

“As Paul Kellar said, the Paintbox will help you as an artist but it won’t make you one.”

Unlike the gimmicky tech of today which has become gamified and we are slaves to, the paintbox was your creative assistant but it didn’t contain gimmicks or filters. Just because something was done on a Paintbox, it didn’t transform it into good art and anyway, like I always say, if you go to a museum and you remember the frame around a painting, it's a shit painting (laughs).The Paintbox is still just a creative tool, an electronic version of an artist’s studio, so it is interesting because one of the things people will say if they do know the Paintbox is “that's so 80s, it's 80s graphics.” But that's like saying, “Photoshop is 90s photography”, or because an artist picks up a 100 year old brush, their artwork is going to look like it was made in 1924. Contemporary artists who come and use my Paintbox certainly don’t create art that looks like it is from the 80’s.

D: You have done so much for the Quantel Paintbox community, reviving it completely. You mentioned before that you got a paintbox yourself, have you been doing any work recently? 

A: Actually, I got asked to do a couple of YouTube intros for the Vintage Computer Federation and the InfoAge Museums which were fun and went down well.

I am currently working on a series of portraits and also have managed to track down an original film recorder and have someone trying to restore it. If I can get that working, it means I can create slides exactly as they were in the 80’s, which would be amazing. I do feel the Paintbox isn’t fully working until it is creating some visuals. It is really sad to see a few Paintboxes sitting dormant in museums, never able to fulfil their purpose in life.

“I wouldn't have had my photography career
without the Paintbox.”

It costs me a lot of money and time to do all this; to buy the equipment, fix it, collect ephemera and put on exhibitions. You don't do it because you necessarily want to make a business out of it. You're doing it for the passion. On a personal level, I'm doing it because I wouldn't have had my photography career without knocking on that disco magazine door after showing my Paintbox portfolio to an advertising agency in the same building. I've got some kind of debt to this machine, as well as how much fun it was then and is again now to work with. The main difference is that back then I was just a tiny blip in the vast Paintbox history, whereas now, I have become both the main historical custodian and creative driver of it forward. To have the first employee, Peter Owen, a former director whose wife Rhiannon coined the word “Quantel” give me his whole archive and to have Paul Kellar grant me the first ever interview on the history of the Paintbox are signs that I am doing good work.

“The Paintbox is a tool but also a big part of history. Sometimes it takes that right moment or the right person to make everyone realize how significant it really is.”

To shine a light on how significant the Paintbox and Quantel were in cultural and digital art history is a sheer joy, especially bringing back such happy memories for everyone whose lives it touched, often leading to amazing careers in TV and movie VFX.

Adrian Wilson, “Retrospective”, at Blackpool School of Art Quantel Paintbox Exhibition, Curated by Aaron Tonks. Courtesy of Adrian Wilson.

D: You have had a retrospective at your old Art School.

A: I did. And it was just a really nice circle, a sentimental creative circle, of doing something in a place that gave you so much. It was at the height of NFT mania, so I could have done that retrospective in a commercial gallery but to do it in the college where you first ever picked up a Paintbox stylus, and that changed your life forever, that's where it should be, right? Like Paul (Kellar) not doing things just for money, it was definitely the right choice.Since then, I have lent one of my working Paintboxes to Blackpool School of Art so that students in the same place can do exactly what I did in 1984, 40 years ago - how cool is that, to be able to go full circle again?

Key former Quantel Staff receiving gifts of vintage tech they worked on, donated from Adrian Wilson’s archive. 

D: What I find fascinating about you, Adrian, is not only that you're so passionate about the Paintbox, but you have been really quite active in the art space. Apart from being a graffiti artist, you've also done quite a few performances and concepts. You also celebrated Jean-Michel Basquiat's 30th death year anniversary with an exhibition you organized and co-curated at 57 Great Jones Street in New York.

A: I've done all sorts of stuff. I have all these old printing blocks from when I was in Manchester that I managed to save - 20,000 pieces of art that all these merchants used that went all around the world. I had a meeting with a museum in Singapore two days ago, who wanted to acquire all that for the collection.

In 2016 I opened an award-winning free store; the Inutilious Retailer, for 10 months in New York where people could use my old block to make clothing which was given away. Because I created murals on Jean-Michel Basquiat’s building at 57 Great Jones Street in New York, the owners donated the space to me for free and I created the first “Same Old Gallery” there. 

“For the show, I got this big sketchbook. I thought, in this visitor’s book, you can make art in the same studio that Basquiat used for the first time ever.”

I didn’t care what art visitors created in the space. It could be good, or bad but for the first time, people could make art in the same place Basquait did. I’ve always enjoyed creating community projects or public art and have used my photography career to fund it all. The more art in the world, the better it is, especially if it gets people thinking and doing instead of just watching. Life is not just for observing, it’s for participating in.

The graffiti and street art I do is probably as close to the inborn graphic design talents that I had always tried to avoid using all my life. It is mostly text or graphics based and often has a subtle message beyond the first impression. The best compliment I get is “that’s the kind of thing I would have done”. It's harmless and fun.

In the same way, why wouldn't you end up thanking a computer that gave you a whole career? And why wouldn't you get all this enjoyment seeing all these other people who remember it, bringing back memories of all their art they did, and their pioneering work, most of which was way more important than mine. This Paintbox fell in my lap and it's a gift, really. A gift that's giving me as much now as it did in the 80s.

All of this creative stuff in my life has proven to be interconnected somehow anyway, so I just enjoy the ride really.

Adrian Wilson, 1987.