Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner puts a new spin on Jackson Pollock-style paint splatter art with his latest project, “Black Hole”. Behold the patterns created when paint is flung into the air by centripetal force, and then photographed at just the right millisecond.
Oefner pioneered a simple mechanism to create these images: he attached a metallic rod to an electric drill, covered the rod in brightly colored paints, and timed his camera to capture mesmerizing structures as they formed in the air.
The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on. To capture the moment, where the paint forms that distinctive shape, I connected a sensor to the drill, which sends an impulse to the flashes. These specialized units are capable of creating flashes as short as a 1/40000 of a second, freezing the motion of the paint.
