Gravity And Paint: Orchid By Fabian Oefner

Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner is back with his latest colourful body of work, Orchid. Fabian is well known for his experiments involving various coloured paints, inks or pigments, often resulting in exceptional abstract images.

Orchid was created by layering different colours of bright paint beneath a top layer of black or white paint, and then dropping a sphere into the mix, resulting in a brief splash of colour created by gravity, and captured with high speed photography. Fabian explains:

“A tank was filled with several layers of different colors of liquid paint with the top layer being either black or white. Then, a sphere was thrown into the paint. As the falling object splashed into the tank, the paint was forced upwards, shaping the individual layers of paint into a blossom-like structure.

Similar to the other two series of the cycle, “Orchid” is about preserving ephemeral beauty. Photographed with high speed devices, these images capture structures of sublime elegance, which appear only for a fraction of a second before disappearing beneath the surface again.”

View Fabian’s other features on Orms Connect: Millefiori: Images created with watercolour inks and magnetic ferrofluid, dancing colours created with pigments and sound waves, and the aftermath of popped paint-covered balloons.

Photographs shared under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial licence.