~Artist Research~
Tom Shannon
https://www.tomshannon.com/painting
Tom Shannon is a conceptual artist and inventor who’s best known for his installation work. Many of Shannon’s works incorporates scientific themes and has used several techniques for making paintings. One of these techniques was using a radio-controlled six colour pendulum paint dispenser of the artist's invention. The pendulum paint dispenser, controlled by the artist, released paint in discrete drops, like a very large inkjet printer, or smooth flowing streams of colour. This became known as the Paint Pendulum series, three series of paintings that spanned from 1983 to 2009.
“There’s this huge invisible shape structures that magnetism takes in the universe. But with the pendulum, it allows me to manifest these invisible forces that are holding the magnets up. My sculptures are normally very simplified. I try to refine them down to very simple forms. But the paintings become very complex, because I think the fields that are supporting them, they're billowing, and they're interpenetrating, and they're interference patterns.”
“Nature is well, it's a godsend. It just has so much in it. And I think nature wants to express itself in the sense that we are nature… And to interface with it, with a device that lets these forces that are everywhere act and show what they can do, giving them pigment and paint just like an artist, it's a good ally. It's a terrific studio assistant.”
