Friday, March 26, 2010

Tom Shannon








Tom Shannon is an American artist who combines science and art to create some exquisitely unique sculptures and paintings. I'm a fan.

I also watched the TED video/interview in which he describes his invention that created the above and below: the pendulum. It's a giant rotating metal rod with paint at the bottom that is mechanically engineered to dispense specific amounts of different color paints at the touch of a button. It creates these intricate circular patterns that collide in the most interesting of ways. From far away, the circles overlap seamlessly. Close up, however, is the Monet-effect - they are drops of multicolor paint that flow around eachother randomly but somehow together. Tom Shannon explains in the video that these seemingly random drops frequently resemble the shapes of several animals and other recognizable imagery, to which he concludes that perhaps there are parts of these designs that could predict future discoveries. I find these paintings to be striking from both far away and up close - and what an ingenius way to create that! Science and art coexisting together, recipe for success (sometimes...).




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