Self-Similar Structures that Amplify Natural Patterns within Paint, and the Feelings They Awaken in the Artist

While searching for a way to make nature’s beauty and complexity visible within the painting process, the author came to see paint as an open physico-chemical system—maintained far from equilibrium—where energy and/or matter can be exchanged with its environment. Under these conditions, paint exhibits a variety of self-similar patterns of increasing complexity, like those found in nature, including growth, flow, erosion and symmetry. Amphiphilic compounds provided the key to creating these self-similar patterns, and time became an element of form, resulting in the creation of representational images characterized by an extraordinary number of spatial scales that, whether viewed from close up or at a distance, were in sharp relief.