Painting with Physics

I have been doing abstract painting for over 30 years. I am largely self taught, although I have attended several courses throughout my technical education. I am a physicist by training and profession and the painting has complemented this work throughout my education and career.

 

To me, painting is a playground where conflicts and disparate elements may be resolved visually. I draw a lot from the natural world, having grown up spending a lot of time in redwood forests of California, and since then in the Alps and now the Rocky Mountains.

 

My painting process is interactive. I start with certain shapes or colors and then I seek to integrate them into a coherent whole, iterating periodically, reevaluating as the work develops. Growing up in a divorced family, going between two different homes, painting provided a way to play with integration of elements that seemed to come from completely different worlds. Painting became a practice for me to find a vision of integration, or to at least practice with dissonance. I have mainly worked with acrylic paints which dries quickly and allows for multiple layering as well as blending.

 

My profession as a particle accelerator physicist leads me down narrow and deep paths in my mind to explain subtle dynamics of relativistic particle motion and creation and evolution of radiation resulting from these high energy particles. I have recently been experimenting with integrating some of the equations from my work into the abstract forms in my paintings, attempting to find peace between the technical mind and the mind engaged in the human or natural world. I hope that my artistic work may have a broad resonance in the world today where humanity depends on highly technical systems that for many are inscrutable. Bringing some of the concepts and artifacts underlying our technical infrastructure into the human and natural world feels integrating for myself, and I hope could have a similar effect on others.