Zion Crossroads, VA
For more than a decade, I observed the world through a lens as a travel and landscape photographer. I was fortunate enough that this career paid for my travels to all 50 states, and all seven continents. My photography was defined by the search for composition, the understanding of light, and at least a minor understanding of color theory. However, after years of capturing the natural world, I felt a compulsion to stop merely documenting physical laws and start collaborating with them. This shift led me to large-scale kinetic painting, a medium where my background in Civil Engineering informs my art as much as my history with the camera.
My studio is less of an workshop, and more of a laboratory. To achieve the scale and precision I envisioned, I rented a space in a warehouse to design and construct a custom 16-foot pendulum—a kinetic engine that would not fit in a standard studio. Unlike traditional painting, where the brush is an extension of the hand, my process involves engineering a system where I surrender partial control to gravity.
The learning curve was steep and solitary. As this is a nascent art form, there were no textbooks to follow. My scientific background became crucial as I investigated the interaction of fluid dynamics and motion. I quickly realized that variables like fluid viscosity and hydrostatic pressure were not just technical hurdles; they were the brushstrokes. I learned that the smoothness of a line is dictated by the volume of paint in the vessel—a full cup creates high pressure and clean lines, while a depletion of fluid changes the flow. This led me to move away from improvised tools toward designing and 3D-printing custom pouring vessels, allowing me to micromanage flow rates and pour-hole diameters with mathematical precision.
A clear example of this synthesis of science and aesthetics is the 60" x 48" rainbow-colored piece serves as a study of the visible spectrum of light against a void. Utilizing the fundamental colors of the rainbow—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet—I layered intersecting elliptical paths over a deep black background. The challenge was not just in the color selection, which draws on my photographic understanding of contrast and saturation, but in the layering of wet fluid. The physics of the swing had to be calculated so that the colors would weave through one another without muddying, preserving the distinct frequency of each hue while creating a cohesive, vibrating web of light.
My work is an exploration of the tension between human engineering and natural chaos. I set the initial conditions—the swing amplitude, the paint viscosity, the vessel geometry—but once the pendulum is released, gravity takes over. The result is not intended to be spiritual or symbolic; rather, it is a visual record of a physical event. I aim to create complex, mesmerizing originals that invite the viewer to get lost in the geometry, tracing the lines to see where the engineer’s hand ended and where the laws of physics began.
