Matthew Macaulay (MM): You initially studied Graphics at Kingston?

Paul Lemmon (PL): Yeah. I thought I’d be an illustrator. I did a lot of image-making and some client work—covers, illustrations—but I always came back to painting. I remember one client even told me, “You’re more of an artist.” That stuck. Back then, there was more access to art in London—more art fairs, more spaces.

I’ve always drawn and painted. Even as a kid, people in my family said I’d make a good graphic designer. But there was definitely a naïve view of being an artist as a job. Eventually, I began taking photographs. That Baudelaire text The Painter of Modern Life—it became a kind of starting point.

MM: So how did things evolve from there?

PL: It was gradual. I’d be in studios with friends and partners, doing bits and pieces, cleaning brushes, working things out. It took about four years to really understand how to make something happen in the way I wanted.

I began experimenting with digital tools, importing video files and manipulating them with scripts. The glitch aesthetic emerged from that—working with digital compression and keyframes. For instance, if you insert a random keyframe into a video, the software can’t process it properly, and it maps visual data incorrectly. That chaos became part of my material.

MM: And then you screenshot these distortions?

PL: Exactly. Some screenshots just work—they have the right texture, color, proportion. I see it as a kind of translation, a transmogrification. It’s about turning digital noise into something physical. A lot of it is intuitive.

I think of it as resistance too—against the ephemerality of the digital. Painting slows things down. A glitch in video is performance; it's code rendered in real-time. But in painting, it’s fixed. The screen becomes still.

MM: There’s definitely a tactile, bodily translation going on.

PL: Yeah, there’s no screen in the final piece, but it feels screen-like. Sometimes I squint to find out how far to go with it. The process is physical—I create a surface, sometimes build up and scrape back layers. Acrylic doesn’t bond in the same way to everything, so materials matter. I use a lot of brushwork to approximate digital noise.

MM: You mentioned the subject matter earlier. How do you choose your visual material?

PL: It’s more about source material than subject matter. The subject emerges in the process. Often, it’s about the screen itself—how we're mesmerized by it. Video, film, digital culture—that's the terrain.

I'm not interested in making up abstract compositions just for the sake of it. What fascinates me is provoking a recognition—triggering the viewer's sense of screen-ness. Like a still life of a screen gone wrong.

MM: So there's a kind of media archaeology going on.

PL: Totally. The formats of my paintings often reflect screen proportions—cinematic letterboxes, mobile screens, etc. That wasn't a conscious decision at first, but it makes sense now. There's also a historical or narrative layer, like when I glitched that clip of Bowie as an astronaut. He became this fractured signal, like a transmission falling apart. It’s like watching someone disappear into pixels.