The Power of The Paintbox

The exhibition “Paintboxed” tells the story of a digital art tool that revolutionized digital graphic design in the 1980s. First launched in 1981, the Quantel Paintbox enabled artists without programming skills to create digital artworks for the first time. Although the high unit cost limited opportunities to a small number of artists, television broadcasters were keen to leverage the aesthetic possibilities of the Paintbox, which was used in the production of film posters (Silence of the Lambs and Forrest Gump), album covers (Nirvana’s Nevermind and Queen’s The Miracle), and music videos including Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing. Notable artists to have worked on the Paintbox include Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Sidney Nolan, and Larry Rivers, all of whom participated in the 1986 BBC documentary series “Painting with Light.” 

After more than 40 years, a global initiative to revive the Quantel Paintbox was launched as a collaboration between Tezos Foundation, ArtMeta, and Adrian Wilson’s historic Paintbox archive, culminating in the forthcoming survey exhibition at The Digital Art Mile in Basel. As part of the Paintboxed Tezos World Tour, a group of leading contemporary artists were invited to create new works on one of the last remaining Paintboxes in Adrian Wilson’s archive. Here, Georg Bak and Alex Estorick sit down with some of the participating artists to discuss the power of the Paintbox as a creative tool and its impact on digital aesthetics around the world.

Georg Bak: You started working with the Quantel Paintbox back in 1984, which you used for the launch of MTV Europe. You also won the ICA New Contemporaries competition with a series that combined the Paintbox with multiple media. How did you get started with this digital graphic device and how did it influence your career as an artist?

Kim Mannes-Abbott: Let’s go back to a world with no internet, no mobile phones, no personal computers, and certainly no Photoshop. In 1981, Quantel invented the Paintbox, the first electronic device that allowed you to paint directly onto a screen with a pressure-sensitive pen. It was light years ahead of its time and, due to its cost, accessible only to major TV broadcasters. But Quantel donated a handful of machines to art schools across the UK — making a pivotal impact on a small number of young artists, including me.

As a 19-year-old Graphic Design student at Middlesex Polytechnic, secretly yearning to be in Fine Art, I discovered the Paintbox hidden in a locked room. Few knew how, or dared, to use it. I got the key, taught myself to master it, and ended up teaching the entire Fine Art class too. 

[The Paintbox] offered a completely new physiology and creative experience — a fusion of analog and digital, brush and screen. I began blending my Japanese ink drawings, photography, and typography in the Paintbox, creating what were among the first true multimedia artworks.

That multimedia work won me the ICA New Contemporaries prize and was shown in central London, validating the Paintbox as a serious artistic tool. My degree show featured Paintbox-based multimedia, which the dean disapproved of, insisting “computers are going nowhere.” Ironically, the show sold out.

One of my first commissions was to develop the iconic graphic and animated identity for MTV Europe’s 1987 launch. That changed everything. 

I became fully immersed in the digital world — working with major broadcasters, restoring Fantasia for Disney, digitizing The Economist, and spending late nights developing my own digital art, much of which has remained unseen until now.

In 1987, I joined Quantel as a creative with deep technical know-how, traveling the world to demonstrate the Paintbox’s potential. I trained artists and designers across continents and worked closely with R&D to shape the software’s evolution — suggesting features such as soft-edged stencils. When asked by the development engineer, “why would anyone need that?” I answered, “Believe me, the creative world will.” Those years honed my ability to create without prompts, filters, and presets — skills that still define my practice today.

GB: I know that there was a vibrant Paintbox scene in Holland at the time. How did artists get access to the Paintbox and were there any institutions that showed digital art exhibitions including the Paintbox?

KMA: Following the launch of the Graphic Paintbox at NAB (now CES), I was headhunted and relocated to New York where the first GPB was sold. A year later, I moved to Amsterdam — where I’m still based. The Netherlands had a vibrant and progressive design culture at the time. I joined Souverein, a forward-thinking creative hub with a single Graphic Paintbox and big ambitions. By day, we served top-tier advertising clients; by night, I used the Paintbox to explore my own artistic practice and create my own art. 

Souverein was known for sponsoring emerging photographers and artists, offering them free access to the Paintbox — then valued at €500 an hour — and a dedicated creative partner. Within weeks of my arrival, Paintbox work was toned for Gerald van der Kaap’s 1991 exhibition, “Hover Hover,” at the Stedelijk Museum and I was collaborating with photographers including Erwin Olaf and Inez & Vinoodh. Together, we created two iconic series for The Face magazine, work that is currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

By the time I left to build my own independent studio, Souverein had amassed eight Graphic Paintboxes — more than any other facility in the world. My portrait was featured on the cover of Paintboxed!, the seminal book on Paintbox work published in 1993. 

Somewhere along the way, I was dubbed the “Mother of Paintbox” — a title I still wear proudly.

GB: You’ve had the chance to create a new artwork on an original Quantel Paintbox. How would you describe the experience? 

Bryan Brinkman: Working with the Paintbox was a mix of nostalgia and excitement. My background includes time in the TV and commercial world, where I used tools such as Flame and Inferno — software that was directly descended from the Paintbox. For that reason, stepping into the Paintbox felt both familiar and foreign, like using a tool I knew but with one hand tied behind my back.

Hackatao: It felt like a journey through time in a parallel space-time line. In the 1980s, we experimented with the Commodore 64, Amiga, and the first Apple computers. But we had never used the Paintbox before, so when the chance came, our eyes lit up. We approached it with curiosity, which quickly turned to admiration. 

It felt like working on the edge between analog and digital. That’s when the idea was born: to capture fragments of data, pixels suspended in time. 

Ours is a living artwork, one that breathed through the echoes still lingering in the Paintbox even after its long slumber. Specifically, it gave rise to glitches, which we captured within a skull. Alive or dead, it doesn’t matter — the imprint transcends time. It’s a kind of safe space where memory and expression are preserved. Even the colors were born from its artistic inconsistencies. We chose the GIF format because it speaks of motion and vitality, reminding us that this technology is still alive and dreaming. This is an artwork suspended between dream and reality. 

Coldie: For me, it was like going back in time. I first used MacPaint at my grandparents’ house in 1986 when I was four years old. I realized that I was using the tool professionals used at that time and was instantly blown away by the drawing stylus and tablet, which were so ahead of their time. Creating a stereoscopic 3D portrait of Keith Haring was highly technical, and it took a number of steps to be certain that at the end the two images would align properly to create the effect of depth that I was looking for. 

It was very special to be able to use this ancient graphic design tool that predated all the software that I have come to know in my creative life.

GB: Why did you choose to create a portrait of Keith Haring? 

C: I have always identified with Haring’s style and philosophy of art. When making a portrait of someone, for me, it is important to have both symbolism and personal connection, otherwise it doesn’t check the boxes. Haring had experimented with the Paintbox on a trip to Rome while he was creating one of his final murals, Tuttomondo. Before making the artwork, I was shown a documentary in which he reflected on the immense opportunity of art becoming digital. As I built out Haring’s face inside the Paintbox, I felt as though he was sharing space with me as I created; the energy was palpable. 

Once I had completed the side-by-side stereoscopic portrait and I looked at the artwork cross-eyed, which is how the human eye is able to see stereoscopic art without the use of VR, I felt a special feeling that this homage was done to honor Haring’s essence in a virtual medium. The coolest part about creating this piece is that this artwork is VR-ready. I wanted to push the limits of a vintage tool in a way that had not been possible in the 1980s. 

GB: Hackatao, like Haring you also work at the intersection of traditional painting and digital technology. In what ways does the Paintbox expand the repertoire of artistic expression? 

H: There’s a fundamental difference between our approach and that of Keith Haring. He came from a purely analog place, whereas we come from years of digital corruption. 

For Haring, the Paintbox was a quantum leap forward; for us, it was a quantum leap backward. Yet it’s the intersection that connects us. The Paintbox experience brought us back to that threshold between analog and digital, a hallmark of that era. It felt like returning to the doorway and realizing how the Paintbox broke artistic boundaries and laid the groundwork for today’s digital art. 

GB: What more can you tell us about the inspiration for your work using the Paintbox and how does it relate to your wider practice? 

H: At first, we approached it in a traditional manner, with pen, colors, brushes, trying to adapt our style to the tool. But by the second day, it felt too ordinary. We like to disrupt, to think laterally. 

Every morning, as we turned on the machine, fleeting glitches would appear — likely remnants of broken data from previous sessions — so we began to capture them, the way one catches fading dreams upon waking. Out of that dreamlike beauty, which reminded us of Philip K. Dick’s androids, we shaped our work, blending chance with the unexpected. In doing so, we felt true to our Hacker nature. 

BB: For this piece, I really wanted to lean into the “paint” aspect of the Paintbox, focusing entirely on brushes and color mixing, which brought me back to my roots doing background art for animated shows. 

When I arrived, they showed me a machine still being built, with an exposed motherboard, graphics card, and all. That moment inspired me. We usually think about the image on the screen, but it’s the guts of the machine that make the magic happen.

GB: Did you face any barriers in creating works on the Paintbox?

BB: The biggest challenge was the lack of an “Undo” button. Using the Paintbox felt more like painting with physical acrylics — you mix your colors, and every stroke is permanent. There’s no going back, so every choice had to be intentional. I didn’t work from a sketch or plan, which meant I had to think a few steps ahead with every move I made. It was both limiting and liberating in the best way.

C: The Paintbox handles images differently from modern software like Photoshop, so I had to re-mask each of the pieces of the portrait. While this took extra time, it was a good experience as I was able to learn more deeply the process of what it took to create a collage using this tool. The other technical barrier I encountered was that, as I positioned each piece, it was “baked” into the composition. This meant that for each of the ten pieces of the portrait, then doubled for the second portrait, I had to ensure that both elements were in the correct z-axis position as well as for x and y. In the end, I managed to set each element properly, which was a miracle, but I had to replace one of the eyes. The process was more difficult than using modern software as I had to “paint out” the old piece before placing the asset in its correct position.

GB: You flew in from California to get on Adrian Wilson’s Paintbox. What made working with a Paintbox different to your normal daily practice as an artist?

C: There was a lot of pre-visualization and planning required for the work to be a success. Due to the technical nature of this type of art, I was working in a different mental space than I would if the piece were more free-form. Given the time constraints, Adrian was the perfect sherpa to assist in bringing my visual plan to life. We kept track of pixel distances for parallax offsets, using many tricks of the trade that I have picked up over years spent making stereoscopic art. This knowledge of the field came in handy as there was no time to start over. I completed the piece successfully on the first pass, which is wild in its own way. I think Keith’s essence had come along for the ride, assisting in the process. 

Alex Estorick: If the Paintbox was partly responsible for normalizing digital aesthetics throughout popular culture, what do you see as its significance today in comparison to contemporary tools? 

KMA: The Paintbox marked a foundational shift in both technology and aesthetics. Its minimal but powerful toolset revolutionized visual language and helped spark the digital design revolution of the late 1980s and ’90s. From MTV to magazine covers, its influence helped embed digital aesthetics deep into pop culture — long before the internet became mainstream.

Compared to today’s AI-driven, hyper-automated tools, the Paintbox demanded pure creative intent. Every edge, blend, and composite had to be executed manually. That limitation was liberating; it pushed me to invent rather than iterate. 

[The Paintbox] taught a generation of artists to build from scratch instead of relying on presets or prompts.

BB: Technology keeps evolving, just like video, film, or paint did for artists in their time. The Paintbox was a major step forward in animation, VFX, and digital painting, and its DNA lives on in the tools we use today. We’re all building on the work of the pioneers who came before us. The art created on the Paintbox when I was a kid played a big role in pushing me toward digital art and animation. That’s what makes this collaboration so meaningful; it’s come full circle.

C: In some ways, The Paintbox is better than contemporary tools. The color-mixing palette replicated the paint-mixing process in ways that I have not encountered with modern design software. The ability to create animation, use layers, mask images, and utilize all the other applications made me understand why this tool was used by the best designers of the period. The tablet itself was mind-blowing for its sensitivity and reaction to movement. I would love to have one myself to use for future pieces — it was a true joy.

H: Think about the impact of the washing machine; today, we take it for granted, but it once revolutionized everyday life. The Paintbox played a similar role in digital art. It is important to recognize the tools and innovations that paved the way for everything that followed. 

It might not be an exaggeration to say that Crypto Art as we know it would not exist without the Paintbox. 

Paradoxically, it’s often the limitations of “outdated” technology that push artists to innovate in radical, unexpected ways. What will we think of AI and the art made with it 40 years from now? Sometimes, you close your eyes and glimpse the universe to come.