About Thomas Lisle

Thomas Lisle is at the forefront of a new artistic frontier, pioneering methods that push the boundaries of contemporary painting in abstraction, expression, and narrative. His groundbreaking work in digital 3D time-based painting is a testament to his innovative spirit and his commitment to advancing the art form.
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Thomas Lisle's digital time-based paintings are not just a new form of art, they are a revolution. They are breaking down the barriers of traditional painting, transcending the limitations of our physical universe, and ushering in a new era of artistic expression. His work is a fusion of the best of contemporary painting and the limitless possibilities of the virtual world, creating a visual poetry that is uniquely suited for the digital age. This is a transformation that will forever change the way we perceive and create art.
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Paintings evolution cannot stay still; like everything, it needs to adapt to the times. This means adapting to digital animation, 3D, digital simulations, and the ever-present internet and screen geared around time-based media. Thomas Lisle's work shows us what painting and sculpture can be in the digital world. His work is not generative or, in other words, randomly made; it's not scanned, it's not made with AI, it's not made with glitches and technical errors; it's purposefully, consciously made with a paintbrush and virtual paint, and then composed over time. So there is that fundamental hand-to-eye relationship, which is the all-important connection between artist and viewer and the plasticity of real paint. Lisle animates the paintbrush and the paint, using a wide range of techniques to program and control what the viewer sees. He can work and utilise forces and manipulate perceived reality in ways that are impossible in the real world to make new kinds of abstraction. Watching a painter paint is not a good way of envisaging the process because Lisle orchestrates the events more like a conductor or composer of a piece of music than a painter aiming for a static result. 9
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Lisle grew up in the heady art world of Leeds in the 60s and 70s. His art makes a conscious effort not to be too concerned with the past; it recognises that there are some fundamental aspects of pictorial composition and visual languages which are fundamental to painting that can't be ignored, but intrinsically, his painting is about the now and the future, the age we live in, and the possibilities of expression and abstraction in a 3D environment where painting, is sculpture and where time and the laws of physics can all be controlled and manipulated.

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Lisle became interested in visual abstraction and languages from a very early age; he says he knew he didn't understand it (for many years, in fact), but he thought that figurative and non-figurative abstract art was where it was at from the age of 7 or 8.
When he got to art college, and after going through a punk rock phase in the late 1970s, he rebelled against traditional means of abstraction and developed a video-based "glitch" art method of abstraction, making art which looked like a painting (but wasn't painted), and that was time-based. Importantly, it was of the time and had an anarchic, rebellious nature to it. Realising that traditional painting had reached its technological/cultural limits. Looking at this body of "glitch" work today, most people think it was produced digitally and recently, not 40 years ago.
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This body of glitch art by Lisle, which has recently been digitised, shows Lisle's interest in abstract visual forms and languages, abstract figurative work, composition, and colour and demonstrates to him that the possibilities of abstraction can be expanded by technology.
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At college, Lisle developed his glitch art into slide-projected installations. After leaving college, Lisle developed these installations into kinetic projections with 20 or 30 projectors for large museum pieces that were shown around the UK. But he started to realise that "glitch" art was limited and random and that he wasn't really in control. He couldn't edit the glitches. He couldn't change them; they were impersonal, and yes, he could use his eye to select and guide, but at the end of the day, the abstraction wasn't from him but some interference in the video signal. They didn't offer what painting could offer, in other words, 'plasticity', but painting didn't offer what time-based and contemporary technology glitches offered, time-based and fundamentally new types of abstraction, and so he realised that digital 3D animations would hold the answers and set out to learn about it.
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He soon realised that the learning curve to make sophisticated 3D animations was steep. It has taken over 30 years of intense experimentation and research to get to the liquid simulations and time-based paintings he is making now. Lisle started to develop digital 3D paint-derived figurative and non-figurative abstractions. These have developed into new ways of thinking about form in 3D, as well as how painting in time is fundamentally different to static paintings. Lisle has also pioneered the concept of developing a still painting in a 3D digital form, which becomes the basis for a physical oil on canvas painting. He would agree that there are many special qualities about a physical painting; the evidence of the process and the artist's mark-making are important factors which time-based digital painting cannot replicate in the same way.
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Lisle's current paintings are the first to use only simulated paint; the journey for digital time-based painting has only just started.