This week, I finally decided to start trying to create something every day. I was inspired by the best lecture I attended in four years of graduate school at the University of Washington. The talk was titled "Hydrodhynamic Instabilities in Painting: Siqueiros Versus Pollock." It was given by Professor Roberto Zenit, a mechanical engineering professor at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico.
Luckily, Prof. Zenit also published some of his findings about how Siqueiros made a portion of the painting "Collective Suicide." Prof. Zenit illuminated how Siqueiros captured a truly remarkable, yet well researched, phenomena of fluid mechanics - The Rayleigh-Taylor instability. The seemingly impossible patterns in Collect Suicide arose from the fundamental differences in viscosity and density between black and white paint. White paint is made from titanium oxide particles, and black paint is made with carbon, resulting in a significant difference in density. By using paint which dries relatively quickly, the painting is frozen in time before the fluids can reach equilibrium.
I have been wanting to try my hand at painting, so I finally treked uphill nearly two whole tenths of a mile to the art supply store where I proceeded to question every aspect of paint before deciding on a basic set of colors which might possibly work for this experiment. When I arrived home, I realized that the paint was not nearly fluid enough, and spent time trying to determine the right consistency of water to add to make something fluid without being too runny.
After sleeping on it for a day, this morning I finally decided to give it a try on a canvas. I threw out my textbook on the scientific method and just mixed paint and water and canvas until something managed to appear which looked less like Siqueiros and more like a toddler. As the paint dries, the image is becoming distorted, but there are still prevalent patterns throughout the canvas. I will continue to scatter-experiment with this technique, although near-future experiments will use far less paint.
