WONDERFUL WATERCOLOR PHOTOS: KIM KEEVER

KIM KEEVER

It’s not rocket science… but, it is brilliant. Abstract art, by former NASA engineer Kim Keever is a mind-blowingly beautiful conundrum of simplicity and complexity. Keever’s fine art photos leverage the physics of fluid dynamics, illustrating and capturing the physical beauty it produces.

Keever’s “canvas” is a 200-gallon aquarium filled with water. He then drops, drips, and squirts multiple colors of paint into water and captures the ever-changing images that result. The paint swirls and blooms into gorgeous clouds, with complicated layers of color and texture. Soft, billowing, feathery, streaky -- all expanding as the paint diffuses in the water. Watch the video.

Serendipity is a big factor in Keever’s works. The shapes and patterns are never predictable. Each abstract form is unique and ephemeral. This only adds to the beauty. He has embraced the randomness.

Each image draws us in. We want to dive into the colors and swirl with them. We want color clouds to fill our consciousness. Sometimes we see recognizable forms, like we do as we gaze up at cumulus clouds. Other times, we are comforted by the amorphousness of it all.

While Keever has limited control over how the pigments mix and move, he can control timing and lighting. He works in a somewhat scientific and investigative process, harkening back to his NASA roots. He usually takes between 10 to 100 shots, per finished image. He has only a brief window to shoot before the paint descends to the bottom of the tank.

It takes Keever anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months to edit the final photos. He optimizes angles, patterns, and shapes. He enhances, inverts and crops. The final works are truly magnificent.

It wasn’t until Keever was working on his graduate degree in thermal engineering that he realized that making art was his true passion. He began by dropping paint into tanks filled with submerged dioramas and hand-crafted landscapes. Then he began to explore a more abstract aesthetic, omitting the landscapes altogether.

Using paints, dyes, pigments, and water alone produces such lush abstract imagery, with infinite combinations and forms. The series could go on forever, just like this, and would never get tired or old. But Keever keeps experimenting, with new colors and mediums. Recently, he’s added balloons to the mix.

Kim Keever lives and works in New York City. His work can be found in numerous collections, including: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, among others.

Currently represented by Waterhouse & Dodd, you can find more works by Keever here. Enjoy some more of his abstract visuals below.

A monograph of his artistry is set to be published in early 2018.

Read more about Beautiful Abstract in Earth As Abstract Artist, Emotions Are Abstract Art,  The Heart & Soul of Beautiful Abstracts, 10 Most Beautiful Abstract Sculptures, Baby Ducks Beat Baby Humans! and Mouthwatering Abstract Art: Richard Haughton.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Mind/Body, Soul/Impact, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Arts/Design, and Place/Time, Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

All images by Kim Keever.