Artist Turns Liquid and Sunlight into Frozen Time - Kernodle's Realism is Fluidism's Visual Appeal

April 10, 2008 - PRLog -- USA, North Carolina artist Robert Kernodle uses two main ingredients:  real sunlight and real liquids.  He freezes both with a camera, stopping actual movement of actual fluid substances.  His fluids consist of:  art-grade acrylics, colored oils, water, plain vegetable oil and other benign fluid substances.  His light source, the sun, brings out the very best patterns in these fluids.

"What I capture", says Kernodle, "is the only possible evidence of paintings that canot exist for any length of time."

Kernodle combines two traditional media to realize something of a netherworld between the two - a style of painting that depends on photography, and a style of photography that depends on painting.  Which is it?  Kernodle is not satisfied to answer with one or the other.  He insists on both at the same time:  

"Some people might call what I do "abstract photography", but this description is not accurate, because what I capture are actual patterns moving through the real world of tangible fluid substances.  I set a real painting into motion, then freeze one instant of that painting's process of painting itself."

A Kernodle painting actually exists first as paint - as real-world paint forms flowing in motion.  But his painting only exists while fully wet and fully malleable.  This is the critical distinction:  His actual painting cannot dry ever to hang on the wall.  Drying destroys the physical form of its fragile wet patterns.

His is a different style of painting, an impecably true dynamic style of painting, a focus on events rather than on solid objects.  Action painting at its most active.  The active painting event has different peak moments.  The best of these visual peaks is what Kernodle aims to capture,  

These peaks, according to Kernodle, help us visualize and appreciate our complex, always moving reality.  They show undeniable proof of form in motion and motion in form.  In his words, "Stillness is not absolutely still.  What appears still is a stable resonance of interfering patterns, like a standing wave."

From his perspective, no part of existence has ever been completely still, yet humans require appearances of stillness to appreciate life's motion.  Again, form is in motion, and motion is in form.  Both form and motion enable one another simultaneously.  This is the essence of a fluid.

Even the captured image is only a slower form of motion.  Like ice, the image is a cube of frozen time, which itself eventually must "thaw" in its own unstoppable passing to erode film, paper, canvas or digital records that imprint it.  The slow-moving substance imprints patterns of the fast-moving substance, causing the appearance of stillness.

Kernodle believes that space, time, mass, energy, up, down, ... are not clearly separate divisions.  They often are confused ideas about only one dimension, which is existence itself.  He suggests that we think best of reality as one perpetually active fluid that forms stable patterns.  Between these stable patterns, there is no such thing as empty space, ... only more fluid, which acts as a background for its own stable patterns.

Traditional paintings always have shown only one peak pattern in the flow of many, related patterns.  Kernodle's fluidism admits this fact full out.  His fluid dynamic images summon the sublime realization that all things are fluid dynamic paintings moving at different speeds.  All things are expressions of the fluid universe, rather than mere things that humans alone express.

"I deal with the cosmos in miniature", Kernodle claims.  "I bathe liquid with light to illuminate primal shapes and enlighten progressive minds."

Kernodle's images appear on the internet (along with more information).  Google "artist robert kernodle" or "fluidism".  Direct links are:

http://www.geocities.com/robertkernodle

http://thedb.com/fluidism

Website: thedb.com/fluidism