Abstract:
One of the very first artists to explore and adopt digital technologies in his practice, Austin Lee creates his paintings and sculptures in VR, using Oculus Rift’s ‘Medium’ as his initial paintbrush, working in a purely virtual space he has described as being “like a blue void that feels infinite.”

The whimsical, often tragi-comic figures and compositions that emerge from this imaginary studio nod to the legacy of Surrealism, Colour Field painting, Pop Art and the history of animation, as much as to the emojis and digital idioms that have become part of our daily visual vocabulary. His process however retains a classically painterly approach. He re-creates these image-ideas by hand, with an airbrush, acrylic and spray paint on canvas, on the surface of his sculptures and in his animated short films, which he builds up painstakingly using a combination of early animation techniques and current animation technology. Virtual reality is just that for him – it is an enabler of, but does not substitute, his painterly methodology.