phytos:

Keith Tyson - Nature Paintings

The support surface for each Nature Painting is an acid primed aluminium panel or mirror. Onto this variety of paints, pigments and other substances are poured and allowed to interact in a number of specified ways. What the painting finally looks like is thus determined by several factors including the viscosity of the different fluids and their behaviour under gravitational pull, the way in which ambient and local temperature affects such things as rates of evaporation or chemical reaction, the miscibility or otherwise of the liquids involved, the quantities used, and the order in which they are applied. The outcome may resemble any one of the myriad things to be seen in nature, from a section of the Horse Head nebula to a histology plate, a rock formation or the scum around an industrial outflow. The title Nature Paintings, however, refers not to the subject matter of the works, but to the manner in which they are made. As Tyson points out, the significant aspect of the series is not that they are paintings of nature, but that they are paintings by nature.