“Painting. Theatre. Animation. They’re all expressions of the same thing”

“Painting. Theatre. Animation. They’re all expressions of the same thing.”

Joe Lichtenstein is a multidisciplinary artist who seamlessly blends painting, theatre direction, and animation. His work is a dance between extremes—grief and joy, solitude and connection, past and present, stillness and motion. He constantly seeks to bridge these states, dissolving boundaries between art forms to create raw, immersive experiences.

His animations breathe life into static images through old-fashioned stop-motion techniques, transforming the still into the living—a “kind of theatre.” This fascination with movement and suspension also permeates his stage work. In Fiesta, he closed the fire curtain and placed the audience directly on stage, turning them from observers into participants, fully present in the now, feeling everything.

Lichtenstein’s work often explores themes of displacement, longing, and transformation—echoes, perhaps, of a family history shaped by upheaval. As a third-generation Kindertransport child, he carries the inherited weight of trauma and survival. His family’s shops were smashed during Kristallnacht, a rupture that remains in his bloodline. These darknesses live in his work, not as history, but as something alive—felt in the hunger of his characters, the cold of isolation, the heat of dreams.

Yet, within this, there is joy. A joy of colour, of movement, of being truly seen. His exhibition If Only We Could Talkinvited audiences to step beyond passivity, engaging with paintings in a performative way, reflecting themselves back through the work. Like dreams surfacing from the unconscious, his images flicker between suffering and celebration, capturing the fleeting nature of human experience.

In his Essex countryside studio, solitude and connection exist in tension. There is the isolation of creation, the hunger to work, to push further, to chase an elusive truth. And then there is the moment of revelation—when a painting, a performance, an animation reaches out and meets an audience, dissolving the space between them. Whether in theatre, animation, or painting, Lichtenstein is always searching—for the moment when displacement becomes home, when the frozen comes to life, when the unconscious speaks.“where does movement end and stillness begin? I want to find it.”

Photo by Rosa Lichtenstein