Daniel Leighton
Daniel Leighton is a painter, Augmented Reality artist, filmmaker, and technologist who began programming at the age of eleven. Born with Crohn’s Disease, he has faced mortality from a young age, leading him on a lifelong journey of emotional and artistic exploration.
His work captures complex emotional states through the use of simple lines, vibrant colors, rhythmic movement, and editing. He integrates technology to expand the boundaries of artistic expression. Using the app he developed, Daniel Leighton Art + AR, Daniel brings his paintings to life through Augmented Reality (AR), animation, and video—creating immersive experiences that merge fine art, technology, and storytelling.
A central aim of Daniel’s art is to build a visual vocabulary of emotions — a way to externalise internal experiences that can be difficult to articulate. His paintings offer emotional landmarks, while his moving image work—including AR and film—guides viewers through deeply felt experiences. Through visual rhythm, pacing, and gesture, Daniel constructs emotional journeys that invite connection, catharsis, and reflection.
Daniel’s somatic awareness began as a necessity—shaped by the intense sensitivity and challenges of living in a body that demanded conscious attention. Through trial, reflection, and intuition, he developed his own ways of listening and responding to the body’s signals. Years of somatic practice—including movement, bodywork, emotional exploration, and embodied mindfulness—have deepened and refined that awareness, offering new tools and perspectives to support what he had already been cultivating. He listens closely: to the tension in a line, the rhythm of an animation, the energy in a colour.
For Daniel, each piece begins in the body. His art is not just something to look at, but something to feel—an invitation to slow down, drop in, and inhabit a deeper sense of presence. Whether through painting, AR, or film, his work seeks to create a moment of resonance or release: a shift in presence that opens the door to greater awareness and deeper, more meaningful connections with ourselves and each other.
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ARTIST: Peter Gabriel
CREATOR: Daniel Leighton
SONG: Playing for Time (Bright-Side Mix) FROM i/o
ARTIST: Peter Gabriel
CREATOR: Daniel Leighton
SONG: Playing for Time (Bright-Side Mix) FROM i/o
Video info:
I’ve been drawn to the concept of memory for as long as I can remember. In my teens, I wrote essays and created diagrams exploring how memory works. Around that same time, I built my first database— an early attempt at organising and making sense of what we hold onto and what we lose. My art, my programming, and my healing have all lived in that same territory: how we store experience, how it shifts, how it lives not just in the mind but in the body.
‘Playing for Time’ struck me the first time I heard it—an unfinished version at the Hollywood Bowl in 2012, with wordless vocalizations and fragments of sound. Even without lyrics, it resonated deeply. It stayed with me. When the final version was released, it carried an emotional landscape that felt uncannily familiar. It echoed something I’ve lived with: the complexity of time, memory, and the spaces in between.
To explore that, I began with three of my original paintings. They served as emotional anchors, but also as the foundation for much of the imagery—created in Procreate, adjusted in Photoshop, and then fed through AI tools like Deforum and Kaiber to generate video content. The resulting footage was layered and transformed further through an intensive editing process in Final Cut Pro. I iterated on the material multiple times—generating, reworking, compositing—trying to reach a place where the imagery sparked real feeling in me. Each pass deepened the emotional texture of the piece.
There’s a kind of emotional territory I return to in my work—a feeling I don’t always have words for, but I know it in my body. This video touches that place. It’s about memory. About time. About the things we carry and the things we come back to. And maybe, in that return, something softens. Maybe we find a kind of presence. Maybe we find ourselves.
Song info:
Playing for Time is a track taken from Peter Gabriel's album i/o, released on 1 December 2023. This is the Bright-Side Mix, by Mark ‘Spike’ Stent.
Words and music by Peter Gabriel. Produced by Peter Gabriel.
Published by Real World Music Ltd. / Sony Music Publishing.