Technical
Imagine handling very shallow puddles of colored liquid paint. Place these colored pools on a flat, rigid surface, then move the surface by tilting it, shaking it, tapping it, or using a combination of these actions. Experiment with pools on thoughtful backgrounds or let it all happen at once. Also propel colored liquids through the air and (when motivated) add formal shapes later. The only guiding rule here is to figure out what feels interesting, beautiful, or enjoyable, knowing that the designs are predetermined in the molecules, geometry, and mechanics of fluid flow.
This is “fluidism”, an intense and exciting physical process that produces a particular style of painting. Fluidism is avant-garde creativity where fascinating aspects of reality are born unexpectedly. In this style of art, calculation cooperates with chance. Wild actions are combined with refined actions. Chaos cooperates with control to produce unique and unpredictable compositions.
action painting
This style of painting is compared to the artistic style of Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), the famous American painter who helped popularize a technique called “action painting” during the 1940s and 1960s. Fluidism, however, does not pretend to mimic, honor or aspire to a predefined idea of “action painting”. On the contrary, this style of action painting has arisen from principles, motivations and circumstances originally and is not officially connected to a historical movement.
Artistic Physics
Fluidism, although it is an artistic style, is more related to the physics of fluid flow. Rather than appeal to the artist’s abstract and expressive emotional states, this style of art reveals the fundamental fluid dynamic nature of the universe. This fundamental and ever-changing nature of the universe registers as emotion, after art appears through spontaneous events. Here the realization of art provokes emotions, not the other way around, where emotions provoke the realization of art.
The truth is that the universe finds expression through an artist, rather than an artist intentionally expressing their own impressions of the universe. In other words, the artist does not “own” his prints. Rather, the dynamics of reality inevitably allow expressions through the movement of physical media that reflect the most primal creative principle of all. Fluidism, therefore, is a direct expression of a primary creative principle. It is the “voice” of the primordial principle through the artist. This creative principle expresses itself.
Self-similar world view
An artist who manipulates fluid paint reflects nature by manipulating itself into inevitable self-similar structures. Think of it this way: if fluid painting could last eons of evolution, then it could form the artist’s body as a complex structure. However, given the particular chemical properties of the paint, the artist sees only an early stage in the process of genesis of life. He or she sees curious primitive patterns that are precursor patterns of organic living forms.
In the chemical processes of life, a drop of liquid could eventually lead to a cell. A filament could eventually lead to a tail, a leg, or an arm. Eventually, a vortex could lead to a beating heart. All of these primitive structures (slicks, filaments, and vortices) exist in fluid flow. All of these primitive structures exist and move within the liquid human body, only now they are contained in more highly organized arrangements and in more complex relationships. A human body that plays with fluids, therefore, is a human body that experiments with the forms and forces of its own physical creation.
(c) 2011 Robert G. Kernodle
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