2008-Explosions : Dylan Fisher

Explosions

During my first semester of junior year at Parsons I became obsessed with the explosion motif. These images represent an exploration into this phenomenon, the act of matter expanding from a central point, dispersing and colliding. During this time I rarely used brushes, and instead chose to harness natural processes to create my paintings. I began to understand how paint of varying viscosities responds when dripped from different heights; how different kinds of paint (enamels, acrylics, oils) react when watered down or thinned with solvent; the possibilities that exists using a heat gun to burn and melt materials; and how wind can be harnessed (air compressor, fans) and used to affect these processes. It became my goal to understand these processes to the point that I could create paintings that seemed devoid of human interaction, but were nevertheless very controlled compositions.

In order to reinforce this concept of controlling the seemingly chaotic processes of nature, I began drawing lines on top of my paintings using rulers, graphs and grids. I would first create a composition with paint and then analytically process the chaos of the paint. This created an interesting dynamic in the paintings, between the natural processes I used to create the initial composition and the analytical grid and line structures I would then implement on top of these compositions, in effect controlling the chaos.

Explosion 27_1 24"x20"
Collected Dust and Metal Shavings, Rubber Cement and Spray Adhesive on Panel