Exploring human emotions through form and colour, Austin Lee combines digital technology with sculpture and painting. Using software as a tool, he has developed an endless ability to experiment and analyse. Personal experiences are woven into spirited and playful figures, awash with colour and intensity. Austin Lee is building a world of his own.
I hear you are heading out to Miami soon. Are you going for Art Basel?
It’s related, but I am not at the actual fair. I'm just focused on doing my thing and then we'll see what happens.
I've never been, but it looks like it's super wild.
It's worth going someday for sure. I've only been there twice. It is definitely a little chaotic, but I mean, it's worth experiencing once.
I feel because it is at the end of the year and my head is full of other stuff, I am never super motivated.
To be totally honest art fairs aren’t the best place to see art. It's a good place to see a lot of things quickly, but it's not the focus and I don't really like party. It’s not usually a priority for me to go to those things.
Similarly, a music festival is not the best place to see the artists you like the most.
That is a good comparison.
To bring it back to you, I went to your latest show at Jeffrey Deitch and it was really good, as well as super fun. I really enjoyed the immersion room.
That's great to hear because that's been a big part of my process. I think my work's always evolving in new ways, and the last few years I've been experimenting with making everything in virtual reality. I just started doing that as a way to make the forms for the paintings. I really fell in love with that as a tool for painting.
How did you learn how to create in thatway?
I just love using a computer to make art. There's a freedom in endless experimentation. I never was into it, until the VR artist Rachel Rosson suggested I try a programme called Medium. She had me come over to her studio and I immediately loved it. I think VR can be very isolating. I really don't like being in a gallery setting with someone with a VR set on. It’s more interesting if it's a personal experience at home. It makes sense because it opens up possibilities, instead of closing off the world to other people in a public space. Using such things as a tool, is a better option. I can just work through ideas quickly. I used it pretty much every day to sketch out ideas. I can just draw a sculpture in 3D and print it out and then it kind of evolved through that way. I just started making weird experiments and getting into motion capture. I have a whole suit that I wear. I will just watch YouTube tutorials until I know how to do it. I don't have any assistants. It’s important to me to learn and do things myself. That's really the point of what I'm doing, as I come out in the work in all these different ways. For me, the fun part is the experimenting.
Do you ever get negative comments about making art with technology? Or in conversations about your work in regards to your use of technology?
Yeah I do. However, my favourite art looks seamless and easy because the person making it is really proficient. I'm touching all the different steps, and I have to be pretty proficient at it. I think some of the stuff is invisible in the way it's done, so you don't think about it when you look at my work. A lot of digital culture is seen as really cold and I was trying to make my paintings more about humanity.
Technology used to be all about efficiency, but now it is used to spur our feelings and humanise.
Agreed, but on the flip side, the internet used to feel more personal and honest, because it didn't feel likepeople were as manipulating. Today, creators are always self-aware of the camera and even if people aren't artists, most people have shifted into this different sense of awareness. Almost everyone's performing. Everyone wants to be strange or get attention.
It does feel everyone is definitely strange now.
Art used to kind of fulfil that function, so now art serves a different function. I'm still figuring that out.
So apart from the developments in technology, how different is your art process from when you started 10 years ago?
It’s hard to tell what's maturity versus adapting to the world around you. I used to try to make work that felt new. I still love going to a painting show that highlights some kind of new language that I haven't seen. Currently, I've been more interested in what am I trying to say. I don't know how to explain that exactly. I’ve seen my work shift from 10 years ago where it was so rad seeing even digital images out of place in the world. In the early 2000s if I saw a painting that looked digital I thought it was crazy. Now those paintings feel weirdly dated in a way that is hard to explain. Sometimes I'll see a work and I think if I saw this in a museum in 200 years, it would still be as exciting. That's something I'm just striving to achieve.
Your work has a lot of figures, who are all these people? Or is it more symbolic?
It depends on the painting, but some are a stand in for emotions. I don't always talk about the personal stuff, but I sometimes make my work about a specific experience. That video piece that you mentioned earlier, also had a related painting. That was based around a pretty traumatic experience where I had a girlfriend who had a surgery that went wrong and she ended up having over 30 brain operations. I had to take care of her for 2 years. It was pretty traumatic. I usually don't talk about that stuff, but I'm starting to open up a little bit about where that piece. It's from my perspective of seeing these doctor figures that are trying to help but they don't really know what to do, but also they were the ones that caused the problem. Someone can be trying to help you, but also harm you. I think most people, even within the gallery, would talk about it as if it was referencing surveillance culture. It can be interesting when you can have multiple truths at the same time.
It’s like something I remember about David Lynch. He refused to explain his films, as he believes it reduces his work. People always want explanations for everything, and sometimes I don’t think you need it.
I usually always shy away from talking about specifics. I'm trying to get more comfortable with feelings, because I used to just not like talking about personal things.
If you do have a feeling you want to express, do you physically pick up a pencil?
I have a little digital tablet. I bring it with me all the time, so then if I have an idea on the subway I can work. I'll draw hundreds of bad drawings really fast and I don't overthink. I used to go through whole notebooks fast. So instead of countless notebooks, I do everything digital first, because the space you have is truly endless.
Does it help hone your skills?
Yeah! I used to do portraits of people with the airbrush and give them the portraits as a thank you. It helped me understand emotions on people's faces. Most of my paintings don't look realistic, but those usually would look pretty realistic. It was a way for me to practice sadness or happiness. Now I look back at those works, I don’t think I was necessarily painting them. I might be projecting my own emotions onto it. I think the cool thing about working from life is it's more like people don't really look like they're photos, but like multiple moments you have with someone. Painting is one of the few mediums where you can actually show this. I remember people in the wholeness, not just when they looked angry for a second.
Does the emotions influencing your work, also influence your colour palette?
I definitely think in colour. I love a colour spectrum. I have some paintings that have every colour in it. I lean into that a lot. If you have a painting that's 8 feet tall and it's all red, your relationship to that is really different than a small painting. Colour is in that connection with emotion, where it can intuitively help you feel something a little bit quicker. An old teacher of mine, Stanley Whitney, would ask the class if we were afraid of colour. He was a great influence on me, especially about risk-taking with colour.
I'm a very visual person, so colour is also very important to me. Recently, I've noticed that much of the work I've come across doesn't seem to explore colour in particularly creative or engaging ways.
I have been noticing that as well. It feels almost old fashioned. I mean there'll be beautiful paintings, but they will have the same kind of muted colour palette. It’s great sometimes, but then you notice a whole trend of that. With oil painting for example, mid-tone and earthy colours are a little bit easier to make work. I think my work is always high key and it's pretty hard to keep the oil paintings high key. I wish people tried to do get outside of the box more.
Maybe with the internet people fall into trends more easily, even with art, so people try and replicate what is on trend.
It's true. I definitely think that that's a bigger issue in general. It is funny how people used to see a show and then a year later you'd see some of it’s influence. Now it's so quick! People see things so quickly, so it has influence on people quickly. So yeah, it does feel like there is a trend of more muted kind of colours.
Why do you think you are so attracted to colour?
I think it’s influenced by the artists I love. David Hockney is one of my favourite artists.
My dog's name is Hockney, obviously named after the artist.
[laughs] That’s amazing! I guess that may explain why you also love colour. He’s someone who he uses colours beautifully. In grad school I was using it only bright colours, until someone said something like if everything is bright then nothing is bright. It’s nice to have the contrast. Even with colour, digital culture had been a big impact. Since I make everything on the computer first, I usually think about digital the colour slider I'll be just all the way slide right to the top of even if I'm painting in the studio. I only started kind of connecting those dots that when I was using acrylic, I would know this fluorescent red is a certain digital red I always use.
Technology has taken over! How do you see it influencing you in the future?
I'm not really sure. It’s always step by step. I have experimented with AI. It's fun to just create strange compositions using them. I’ve used it to do some weird stuff that maybe I wouldn't do with drawing. I’m pretty shocked by the fact that it works so well. It’s hard to ignore that. The difference is an AI drawing feels like stock image or something boring. You can start realising maybe what the point of art is that it's actually just coming from one perspective and that's the beauty of it. We're sharing a lived experience. I feel AI reveals some cultural thing that is broad, and you're just getting a snapshot of that which can be interesting too, but that's not really what I look for with art.
I don’t understand why people would use AI to do the fun part of their job, like the creative process, or the idea building. If you're a illustrator or a painter, why would you not want to illustrate or paint? I would want to use AI to clean my house.
Exactly. It’s the same problem with anything based off an algorithm. It starts making assumptions about people based on their perceived identity which becomes really problematic. I don't think it's going away. The part that's interesting is for example, my brother's a chef and he likes to experiment with drawings in AI. It's just like what we were talking about before with social media. It's this weird sneaky way for people to make art without even thinking about it. I like what you're saying about creating is the fun part for me, but for other people it might not be. I don't know if you call it making art, but a way to express themselves.
It will be interesting in the future, because if everyone makes art, what will make it special?
That's a good question. My friend asked me recently something like, “What would people do if we didn't have to worry about money?” He thought more people would make art, if they didn't have to have jobs.
I am not sure about that. I don’t think everyone aspires to create. What will be more interesting to me is what art be like, and how will someone own their creativity.
That definitely gets complex. I have seen some influence of my work on other people. I think what you're talking about is the difference between aesthetic and if it's connected to the content and meaning. AI is just the aesthetic with nothing behind the surface. It's kind of rendered a little bit less useful in that way. I always think technology is interesting because we have these brief moments where there are no rules. It feels like we are at the moment of AI before it becomes mundane. Due to this freedom, I'm always chasing these new moments. You don't have to break the rules, because they're not set.
How is the future of art looking for you?
I've been pretty excited about painting. I hadn't painted in oil since I was a lot younger. I love airbrushing still, but I've been trying to figure out using oil painting is actually a way to create this deep space that I'm experimenting with in VR and 3D modelling. I've been using Unreal Engine to make a video game of all the sculptures I've made. I have all these actual places that are digital, that I’m making paintings from. It feels cool that I want to share those original places with people. I want to make this digital environment where people can explore. The next thing I would do is create a space you can walk around and see the whole environment. I want people to feel like they are experiencing a sculpture park that I have created.
Photography by Lanna Apisukh
Austin Leewears own clothes