Ephemeral blooms


Orchids are hard to draw or paint.


The ‘Paint Action’ cycle is quite extraordinary. A Swiss artist has modelled paint by natural forces, ie gravity, creating a new kind of orchid - if only for a split second.

Fill a tank was several layers of different colours of liquid paint with the top layer being either black or white. Then, throw a sphere into the paint. As the falling object splashes into the tank, the paint is forced upwards, shaping the individual layers of paint into a blossom-like structure. Hence ‘orchid’.

Artist Fabian Oefner photographs the result, using high-speed devices, capturing structures of great elegance, which appear only for a fraction of a second before disappearing beneath the surface again.  

Orchid blooms last for months, and these for no time at all. Both are exquisite.

By Pamela Kelt

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