Photoshop is the mainstay of everyone’s digital art toolkit but before Adobe’s app dominated everything there was Quantel Paintbox. You may not have heard of it, but Paintbox had some very famous fans back in the 1980s, and now its coming back, kind of.
Artists such as Keith Haring, Larry Rivers and Jennifer Bartlett all experimented with Quantel Paintbox in the 1980s. Before David Hockeny found iPad art was a satisfying way to sketch anywhere, he was splashing pixels around in Quantel’s experimental digital painting tech – not an app as such, Paintbox was a chunky standalone computer.
This forgotten digital art tech is set to make a return, of sorts, as photographer Adrian Wilson has tracked down 20 works of art created on this obscure digital painting tech and will be showing them at the exhibition from the Computer Arts Society called ‘How Quantel’s Paintbox Changed Our World‘, in Leicester this summer.
“At $250,000 to buy, or a minimum of $500 an hour to rent, Paintboxes were the Rolls-Royce of computer graphics,…