Turbulence at Extremely Small Distances Painting

This is an original abstract painting I made at Industry Lab in Cambridge during my time as Artist in Residence there. It is painted on a high quality, 3/4 inch deep gallery wrapped pre-stretched canvas with a wire installed in the back for easy hanging. There are drip marks on the sides of the canvas, which I think are nice because they help tell the story of how the painting was made. If you don't like them the painting can easily be framed in a standard pre-made or custom 18 x 24 inch frame. This painting was completed on January 25, 2014. My technique involves putting down several layers of paint and ink. The first layer is a thin underpainting done entirely in acrylic. I let that dry partially and then smeared a layer of thick white acrylic paint over it using a tool similar to a rubber spatula. The action is somewhat like frosting a cake. The white paint mostly covers the underpainting, but some still shows through, and the wet paints in the underpainting get picked up and mixed in. Next I take droppers of brightly colored inks and draw them through the thick white paint, leaving indented channels filled with ink. You can see some of these channels in this painting. There are some loopy red ones in the upper left corner, some dark blue ones in the upper right, brownish orange in the center, and others all around. Sometimes I drag the droppers through the paint without squeezing any ink out, leaving empty channels behind which get filled up later. That's what's going on in the center. I also drip some ink on areas where I want bright color without the lines. After I sketched out those inky channels and colored areas I spray the whole canvas with a fine mist of water. The water breaks the ink's surface tension. It's kind of a magical effect: the colors start to spread out like cultures growing on petri dishes in time-laps. The more water I spray, the further the colors go, and when they meet each other they mix. Next I added the black lines. Those are done by squeezing thinned down black acrylic paint out of a squeeze tube like what you squeeze ketchup out of in a diner while flinging the tubes around in wide arcs. The canvas is quite wet at this point and the black paint doesn't always stay where it lands. Pools of watery ink and wet paint move around pushing aside whatever is in their way. On top of everything I squeezed those nice thick white acrylic squiggly shapes. I also added splotches of pure magenta acrylic, and generous amounts of iridescent silver ink in pools of wet pigment. The silver ink penetrates the wet pigments and sinks below it, creating a sort of back-lit effect, giving the color a nice shine. The white acrylic paint absorbs the wet pigments from around it, or you could say the wet pigments push their way into the pristine white forming dendritic patterns and nice gradients. A similar thing happens with the magenta; you can see the patterns in it as well. The last things I added were the black spots in the white forms. These provide areas of maximum contrast, which your eyes are naturally drawn to, and tie the composition together. They also create a subtle anthropomorphic effect: it is hard not to see them as belonging to creatures, but creatures so strange they really cannot be classified as such. The effect suggest that something deeper may be lurking just beyond our ability to perceive it. The title comes from the wikipedia article on Quantum foam: "quantum foam can be used as a qualitative description of subatomic space-time turbulence at extremely small distances."

Painting:Acrylic on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:18 W x 24 H x 0.8 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.