A new class of art
The word “fluids” can be used to name a distinct category of fine art painting in which both the subject and the substrate are the same. “Substrate” means the actual material that the painting (i.e. the paint) is made of. “Theme” means the intellectual impulse through which the painting grows (i.e. meaning, representation, or purpose).
In fluid art, the substrate (i.e. what the painting is made of) and the subject (i.e. what the painting is about) cannot be separated. The substrate is the subject, and the subject is the substrate. The visual and verbal appearance of fluids extends directly from the physical properties, chemical properties, and dynamic patterns of moving fluids. In fluid art, both the perceptual and conceptual appeal of fluids interact to produce profound enlightenment.
Thus, flowchart is the activity of mixing and manipulating real fluids, in order to discover, experiment with and present fluid dynamic patterns as ephemeral art forms.
The primary source of inspiration and intelligence
Throughout history, many artists have engaged in creative activities that fit the “fluid” label. More than 2,000 years ago, Shinto priests in ancient China, for example, created sacred art by dropping ink into puddles and transferring the resulting concentric patterns onto rice paper. Ancient Japanese artists, during the 12th century, refined the ink-drop technique into what later became officially classified as suminagashi, which means “floating ink.” Artisans in the Ottoman Empire developed, during the 15th century, a closely related style of painting called “ebro”, which roughly means “cloud art”.
In modern times, a technique known as “marbling” appeared in the West, and subsequently periodically falls into fashion. Closer to the present day, with the advancement of the physics of fluid dynamics, many science students have discovered the beauty of this physics, which has led to some scientifically minded people turning their primary interests towards the art of fluid dynamics. One such scientist-turned-artist, for example, is Chris Parkes, who originally studied engineering at Imperial College London.
It seems that most of the world’s religions have always had a close association with fluid parallels with artistic and scientific interests. The idea that life and reality arose from fluids seems, in fact, to be widespread across various beliefs in the world, from ancient Egyptian mythology to modern Jewish and Christian creation stories.
While select artists throughout history have found great inspiration in fluids, and while modern science has made extensive use of fluid dynamic ideas, nearly all religions have revered fluids as the origin and foundation of reality, as we know it.
Modern astronauts have played with liquid water in weightlessness in outer space. Contemporary painters played with liquid paint in the conditions of minimal gravity of parabolic aircraft flights. Don Pettit is one of those astronauts, and Frank Petronigro is one of those illustrators. Both metaphysics and physics now revere fluids in each field’s own way.
Hence, a special word, “liquidity”, It seems justified to help unite this widespread human creative interest.
Transcendental Action Panel
American painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) may be best considered as the pioneering fluid artist. Art critics of his day referred to him as an “abstract expressionist” or, more specifically, a “drip painter” or “action painter”. However, Pollock probably fully understood that he was not expressing anything on purpose. Rather, it was the expression itself – both the essence and the verb of the expression, without any formal intentions for it to be so. Pollock realized that spontaneous actions can lead to pathological patterns. His painted, dried patterns were frozen echoes of his once fluid actions. Thus, Pollock was an extension of the energetic flow of the chosen substrate (i.e. paint). He could record the remaining patterns of his actions in the original paint medium, because these patterns were stable while still wet. Pollock’s liquid styles dry in nearly the same appearances as their wet counterparts.
The advent and advancement of photography clearly demonstrated that some fluid patterns could not dry on their native substrates. These fluid patterns are either very transient, or destroyed by drying. In other words, some of the visually appealing moments of wet flow cannot be preserved in the original substrates where they appear. A bubble, for example, pops up. The liquid spray paper quickly moves from the air into the mass from which it sprayed. A particular collision or cracking of the liquid layers vanishes, before the drying mechanisms can even contain those patterns. Obviously an idea “coloring” It extends beyond the bottom layer of the dry painted artifact.
Photography has shown that painting is, or can be, an act in which certain patterns cannot be captured, unless the artist transcends the medium in which those patterns arose. Thus, the photographic artist can capture an impression of a bubble before the bubble bursts. A photo artist can literally freeze a flying sheet of liquid before the sheet gets stuck back into the mother pond. A photographic artist can immobilize a particularly attractive collision of colors or a particular outline of colored liquid bands, before they dissipate into a homogeneous solution. Patterns can now be made invisible due to the speed of certain actions visible through the photography artist’s camera’s ability to stop motion. Photography enables a category of motion painting that defies the traditionally fixed definition of the word “painting”.
Subsequently, fluidics evolved from various traditions involving handling wet liquids and allowing these liquids to dry. Fluids evolved into the modern quest to photograph manipulated fluids while still wet. Traditionally, the only dried remnants of stable wet patterns were possible artifacts. Now virtual dried remains (i.e. photographs) of ephemeral, impossible-to-dry patterns are possible. These are “transcendental action paintings” – deep extensions of the basic idea of ”painting”.
Copyright (c) 2011 Robert G. Kernodle