Austin Lubetkin is a software engineer and artist on the autism spectrum based out of Los Angeles, CA. He combines his own drawing style with AI and video to create a psychedelic explosion of color and imagery. His colors originate from his synesthesia where he sees his emotions as colors around him. Austin was part of Opulent Mobility at the Los Angeles Makery, and it was great talking with him and finding more about his art and process! Many thanks to him, to all the artists of Opulent Mobility, and to Joe Roger Rivera Perez for ASL interpretation of so many of the latest artist interviews. This interview is edited for clarity.
In future Substacks I’ll be putting out edited transcripts of the Genius Teatime talks. Stay tuned!
Art description by Teri Grossman: “In this animated self-portrait, a young man with a pale tan complexion, short trimmed dark brown beard and mustache faces us. He wears glasses. From the right side of his head are pulsing, colorful cloud-like swirls and coiled ribbons. A second image of the young man in silhouette faces left. The second figure’s cream-colored hair blends into the first figure. Numbers and letters appear and disappear between the two. Monarch butterflies float around them.”
Interview with Austin Lubetkin
Laura So how did you find out about Opulent Mobility in the first place?
Austin So I've seen some stuff on Instagram, and I've been active with the Monrovia Association of Fine Artists. I found out about shows going on in Monrovia, and Opulent Mobility had once taken place in the city I live in. So I wanted to get involved in past years. This is the first year I've been able to participate, get a piece together for the show. I’m really excited about that.
Laura How long have you been doing stuff with Monrovia?
Austin I moved here January 2020, so it was a very interesting time to move here, but I got involved in Monrovia Association of Fine Artists. I started showing locally. I also show with several other galleries, including TAG Gallery and Los Angeles Artist Association.
Laura Nice. How did you get involved with them?
Austin Both of those are juried. You send an application, create a body of work, submit that, and the galleries review it. My journey with art actually started before I even got here, back where I was in Florida. My mother influenced my artwork. We did a lot of art therapy together that kind of helped me open up and communicate through art, really use art as a tool of therapy, and I've always really relied on art to that extent.
Laura That’s wonderful. Did you get started in art therapy? Was that something she had been doing?
Austin My mom previously had worked with autistic adults, and she previously was an artist, but she just worked with me and there was an art teacher we worked with that she guided our lessons with. So that was a huge help at that stage of my life. And the art has always really been there for me through everything.
Laura What first started calling to you that made you want to make art?
Austin See, it wasn’t really necessarily a choice. I have something called synesthesia where I see these colors around me, where it's a mix of my brain chemistry and my emotions that kind of get put into my environment. So anything that’s a plain surface like a white wall or the night sky is replaced by all these colors and details. I really reflect my own brain chemistry, my own emotions. So I was a young child that was really surrounded by all these really intense emotions that I couldn't make sense of. I didn't really have a lot of control of my emotions at the early stage. So I think part of learning to control that was also exploring those colors through art and learning to process them through art.
Laura It's a great way to do that, to give them a place. How did they first start taking form?
Austin It’s always been there. When I would have tantrums as a young child, it would take over my entire vision, basically. So it’s kind of a feedback loop. But as I've gotten more control over it, as I've grown older, it's more restricted to just the environment.
Laura The works that I've seen of yours have primarily been based on people. Is that your main interest?
Austin Not necessarily. I do some figurative, I do some abstract. I think the core guiding principle is my use of color. I really try to have a signature use of color. People see my colors and immediately know it's one of my pieces. My colors all come from my synesthesia. And they also, I think, lend themselves to the world of psychedelics as well. People see my colors and very much associate them with their experiences in psychedelics.
Laura I am sharing the piece that you submitted to Opulent Mobility.
Austin So this was a self–portrait. I was kind of trying to look at all these colors kind of exploding out from my own mind, in a way, and blooming outwards. I have details like the numbers on one side and the colors and shapes on the other. So it's kind of like, you know, the whole brain manifesting together. But really it was a self portrait about this sort of explosion of creative force that comes from within. I really tie that to my autism. I view my autism, when I see with my synesthesia, as this organizing principle that kind of segments things and organizes them and puts them into more of a high contrast perspective versus, you know, you think of emotions as more of a gradient, and it tries to make some extremes more black and white. So I try to represent how it segments some of my emotions in that way, to represent that creative force that’s tied to my autism and the way I'm inspired and driven creatively.
Laura What are the mediums that you prefer?
Austin I do a mix between media painting and digital art as well as video and augmented reality. So with a lot of my pieces, I will start with a digital collage, combining previous paintings with photographs or a selfie of mine. I sort of combine them all together to create these collages. And then on top of that, I will usually print the image down on a canvas and paint on it and that sort of evolves the style, with each one of these paintings that kind of turn into the next iteration of the piece, and kind of evolves between the digital and the painted form. And I choose to evolve my style that way, going back and forth. This piece is combining several paintings of mine and was inspired by a piece I did previously.
This was sort of a psychedelic Statue of Liberty, and it's a collaboration with a pop artist. And we kind of evolved my style where I did the base piece and looked at his use of mixed media. This is one of the first pieces where I had this balance of the white, the negative space with my high contrast colors. This was a big inspiration that carried over to the self portrait.
Laura Got it, it's got an Op Art kind of look to it. It's got a Peter Maxx kind of feel.
Austin For sure.
Laura Are there different artists that you view as being inspirations?
Austin I think Lisa Frank, I mean, she’s very commercial, but I think that's an inspiration as well.
Laura There are a lot of people who are really big fans of Lisa Frank, you know, (Laugh) they still have the unicorns. These are beautiful pieces. What made you think about incorporating digital and video into the pieces?
Austin Sure. I started doing more physical painting, learning more traditional art, but there are limits with what I can envision creatively and the speed my brain works at with what I can do physically. So digital helps me work more at the speed of what I can think through things. And then as my skills have grown as an artist, I'm able to take pieces and recombine them with my skills as a painter and bring them back and create more mixed media compositions that I can do at my own pace now that I've got the foundation in place.
Laura Nice. So do you make the painting first and then incorporate the video? How do you do that?
Austin So usually there are multiple stages. I’ll have a piece like this. At this stage I'll take a high quality photo or a scan of it. Then I'll start animating a video on top of that, adding video elements and animation to it. Sometimes I'll use AI to create certain effects on the piece. Then I will have that animation play, usually when people scan it with an app. They are able to interact with it and see the animation come off the piece.
Laura You were saying that you were trying to get it so it doesn’t have to use an app now.
Austin Right. My own experience with gallery shows is that a lot of people are actually drawn to the piece, but not taking that step forward to interact with the actual animation. I’m trying to do, for this show, an example of a pure video piece where I’m going to have a TV screen that’s going to be framed, and it’s going to be playing the video piece and people will be able to see the video just moving constantly. For one thing, I think it will also be more accessible. I think there’s definitely some accessibility challenges using an app for a lot of factors, and I think this kind of plays into that. I’m trying a new format with that, with this show as an opportunity to really test out and see how accessible this new format is.
Laura I think it will be really interesting, because yes, sometime people when they’re having to interact with an app, sometimes they’ll do it, sometimes they don’t want to deal with it, and then they’re not getting the full experience. So, this will be a really nice way to interact with a work. I had another artist who, a lot of their work is done online, and part of the experience that is intended is that feeling of what it’s like when you just come across it online. Is that something that you’ve ever done?
Austin Sure, I’ve definitely created experiences through social media and Instagram or act with them and see these video pieces, but, I think there's limitations with being purely a digital artist, where I try to really show my skills as a painter with all my canvases as well, and show that I can paint, create these pieces on that sort of fine art level. And I think I'm limited in the digital space.
Laura There's only so much you can do. And honestly, on screen there's only so much resolution you're going to get. So you're really not finding all the details.
Austin I think even beyond that there's an element of originality where I think a painted piece can be viewed more as a one of one, and has more value in the art space. I think that's what I really try to create with all my pieces, is to add that unique element to each one with the physical. And that's why I've really been relying on that originality as an enhancement versus these virtual pieces. Because digital, as I said, you know, it's limited, but it still doesn't necessarily have that same fine art connotation of value.
Laura It’s interesting. If you start thinking of it in terms of if somebody is purchasing your piece, are they purchasing part of the app? How are you going to manage that?
Austin Right, and even beyond that. I had conversations with the company behind the app recently about, you know, is this app going to be available forever? How do I guarantee with a sale that people can continually interact with the painting? Those were questions that tie into it because art has that kind of permanent value. And that's something that you limit yourself with in the digital space.
Laura Because those things change all the time. It's not that you can't still, for example, access a floppy disk, but it's going to be more difficult.
Austin I mean, even stuff like Instagram, in 50 years that might not be around.
Laura Yeah, it's going to be hard to tell what that format is going to become and how it's going to work. So that's going to be really interesting to see. Is that something you've been interested in trying to develop as well?
Austin You know, I've had ideas about trying to create some sort of perpetual license with the app, like certain pieces where you can purchase a license for like, for free... But I think part of that's going to rely on developing my own tools, to have those sort of digital tools available in a fine art context with, you know, a guarantee that these digital experiences will be available for a certain period of time.
Laura What an interesting thing to think about. I mean, I think any artist has some thoughts about what the longevity of their pieces are going to be, but this is a whole different realm of how that's going to work.
Austin And that's the blend between the traditional art space and the digital spaces. You know, you look at art from hundreds of years ago and it has immense value, and the context people put on art is that they expect that from every piece. I think it's hard to expect that with a lot of these digital art pieces, photos will fade, prints will fade. They're not being made with these long lasting materials.
Laura Yeah. So many things already have. Statues have crumbled, oil paints fade, and all of this is innately time bound, you know, but you try to make it last as long as you can. What got you excited about AI?
Austin So by day, I’m a software engineer. I work in aerospace and I'm an AI machine learning computer vision specialist. So this is kind of the area I work in, the area I developed tools in, and I've also developed several accessibility tools for things like Google Maps to make navigation more accessible. But a lot of my work has been in that realm of AI technology.
Laura What are you doing to make Google Maps more accessible?
Austin This is a project I actually did in college cooperating with Google Maps where I designed a tool that gave directions in a visual format, like turn right when you see CVS, turn left at the 7 –Eleven, which not a single app had done at the time. It was a model that in my own experience made directions more accessible and easier to understand. And that was something that I felt was missing in the apps, where they were strictly limited by their developers developing things very numerically, like turn right at 500 feet, turn left at so-and-so street name. They were quantitative versus qualitative. And that, I think, limited their audience. And the audience was limited by the developers of the apps. So I focused on trying to create a more accessible model for the experience.
Laura Do you feel like you're doing something like that with your own artwork?
Austin I think so. I've had several concepts I've tested out that are in development that have tried to make artworks accessible. I have a piece, I believe, at the Los Angeles Center for the Blind that is interactive, and you can touch and interact with sort of a Braille poem on it. But I think with my own art, I'm trying to experiment with the digital tools, trying to find the right medium that is the foundation to really make those digital tools accessible. And that comes in a lot of formats. One thing I've been experimenting with is translating colors to sound. That's been an ongoing project, even going back to college, where I've experimented with turning the colors people interact with or are looking at into a combination of string instruments so that they can hear colors.
I think people were able to pass a colorblind test when they were colorblind. And that was a cool project. It's just that the format has to be right for that, because current examples are, you know, using a touch screen, which is very small, or something like eye tracking, which is not accurate enough to really make the app, you know, functional in a public space.
Laura All right. But that certainly is a work in progress. That’s kind of exciting, right? To have it always be in flux and to have new things in process.
Austin For sure. I'm trying to be an innovator in that space. I'm trying to be known as one of the, not only the top artist with a disability, with autism, but also an artist who's trying to develop tools that make art for everyone more accessible.
Laura Austin has been in a couple of shows I curated. This is a piece that he had in Enter the Goddesses, an exhibit about interpreting the goddess in all of her various forms.
Austin So this was a mixed media piece I made, it was a combination of a digital painting, a collage of my own sort of abstract pieces, and painting as well to kind of create this overall composition. It was also part of an ongoing series of tarot cards, this was the High Priestess card and I'm working on a psychedelic tarot deck.
Laura I was thinking about the idea of translating those colors to sound, which for this piece would be really fascinating because this to me feels like an explosion.
Austin That's also, though, the challenge I had with the format of sound; people think with a piece like this you want an overall composition and a logic, so are translating the overall flow of the piece, versus the models I had been working on, a similar version where people were really looking at specific colors and they would interact with just those colors and return to… the overall challenge of training an overall musical composition out of a piece is a much more challenging plan that's still in progress.
Laura I would think so. It’ll be a really interesting challenge.