Tom Shannon: The painter and the pendulum

John Hockenberry: It's great to be here with you, Tom.

And I want to start with a question

that has just been consuming me

since I first became familiar with your work.

In you work there's always this kind of hybrid quality

of a natural force

in some sort of interplay with creative force.

Are they ever in equilibrium

in the way that you see your work?

Tom Shannon: Yeah, the subject matter that I'm looking for,

it's usually to solve a question.

I had the question popped into my head:

What does the cone that connects the sun and the Earth look like

if you could connect the two spheres?

And in proportion, what would the size of the sphere

and the length, and what would the taper be to the Earth?

And so I went about and made that sculpture,

turning it out of solid bronze.

And I did one that was about 35 feet long.

The sun end was about four inches in diameter,

and then it tapered over about 35 feet

to about a millimeter at the Earth end.

And so for me, it was really exciting

just to see what it looks like

if you could step outside and into a larger context,

as though you were an astronaut,

and see these two things as an object,

because they are so intimately bound,

and one is meaningless without the other.

JH: Is there a relief

in playing with these forces?

And I'm wondering how much of a sense of discovery there is

in playing with these forces.

TS: Well, like the magnetically levitated objects --

like that silver one there,

that was the result

of hundreds of experiments with magnets,

trying to find a way to make something float

with the least possible connection to the ground.

So I got it down to just one tether

to be able to support that.

JH: Now is this electromagnetic here, or are these static?

TS: Those are permanent magnets, yeah.

JH: Because if the power went out, there would just be a big noise.

TS: Yeah.

It's really unsatisfactory having plug-in art.

JH: I agree.

TS: The magnetic works

are a combination of gravity and magnetism,

so it's a kind of mixture of these ambient forces

that influence everything.

The sun has a tremendous field

that extends way beyond the planets

and the Earth's magnetic field protects us from the sun.

So 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.

JH: And they're non-deterministic.

I mean, you don't know necessarily where you're headed when you begin,

even though the forces can be calculated.

So the evolution of this --

I gather this isn't your first pendulum.

TS: No. (JH: No.)

TS: The first one I did was in the late 70's,

and I just had a simple cone

with a spigot at the bottom of it.

I threw it into an orbit,

and it only had one color,

and when it got to the center, the paint kept running out,

so I had to run in there,

didn't have any control over the spigot remotely.

So that told me right away: I need a remote control device.

But then I started dreaming of having six colors.

I sort of think about it as the DNA --

these colors, the red, blue, yellow,

the primary colors and white and black.

And if you put them together in different combinations --

just like printing in a sense,

like how a magazine color is printed --

and put them under certain forces,

which is orbiting them

or passing them back and forth

or drawing with them,

these amazing things started appearing.

JH: It looks like we're loaded for bear here.

TS: Yeah, well let's put a couple of canvases.

I'll ask a couple of my sons

to set up the canvases here.

I want to just say --

so this is Jack, Nick and Louie.

JH: Thanks guys.

TS: So here are the --

JH: All right, I'll get out of the way here.

TS: I'm just going to throw this into an orbit

and see if I can paint everybody's shoes in the front.

(Laughter)

JH: Whoa. That is ...

ooh, nice.

TS: So something like this.

I'm doing this as a demo,

and it's more playful,

but inevitably,

all of this can be used.

I can redeem this painting,

just continuing on,

doing layers upon layers.

And I keep it around for a couple of weeks,

and I'm contemplating it,

and I'll do another session with it

and bring it up to another level,

where all of this

becomes the background, the depth of it.

JH: That's fantastic.

So the valves at the bottom of those tubes there

are like radio-controlled airplane valves.

TS: Yes, they're servos with cams

that pinch these rubber tubes.

And they can pinch them very tight and stop it,

or you can have them wide open.

And all of the colors

come out one central port

at the bottom.

You can always be changing colors, put aluminum paint,

or I could put anything into this.

It could be tomato sauce,

or anything could be dispensed --

sand, powders or anything like that.

JH: So many forces there.

You've got gravity, you've got the centrifugal force,

you've got the fluid dynamics.

Each of these beautiful paintings,

are they images in and of themselves,

or are they records

of a physical event

called the pendulum approaching the canvas?

TS: Well, this painting here,

I wanted to do something very simple,

a simple, iconic image

of two ripples interfering.

So the one on the right was done first,

and then the one on the left

was done over it.

And then I left gaps

so you could see the one that was done before.

And then when I did the second one,

it really disturbed the piece --

these big blue lines

crashing through the center of it --

and so it created a kind of tension and an overlap.

There are lines in front of the one on the right,

and there are lines behind the one on the left,

and so it takes it into different planes.

What it's also about,

just the little events,

the events of the interpenetration of --

JH: Two stars, or --

TS: Two things that happened --

there's an interference pattern, and then a third thing happens.

There are shapes that come about

just by the marriage

of two events that are happening,

and I'm very interested in that.

Like the occurrence of moire patterns.

Like this green one,

this is a painting I did about 10 years ago,

but it has some --

see, in the upper third --

there are these moires and interference patterns

that are radio kind of imagery.

And that's something that in painting

I've never seen done.

I've never seen a representation

of a kind of radio interference patterns,

which are so ubiquitous

and such an important part of our lives.

JH: Is that a literal part of the image,

or is my eye making that interference pattern --

is my eye completing that interference pattern?

TS: It is the paint actually,

makes it real.

It's really manifested there.

If I throw a very concentric circle,

or concentric ellipse,

it just dutifully makes

these evenly spaced lines,

which get closer and closer together,

which describes how gravity works.

There's something very appealing

about the exactitude of science

that I really enjoy.

And I love the shapes that I see

in scientific observations

and apparatus,

especially astronomical forms

and the idea of the vastness of it,

the scale,

is very interesting to me.

My focus in recent years

has kind of shifted more toward biology.

Some of these paintings, when you look at them very close,

odd things appear

that really look like horses or birds

or crocodiles, elephants.

There are lots of things that appear.

When you look into it, it's sort of like looking at cloud patterns,

but sometimes they're very modeled and highly rendered.

And then there are all these forms

that we don't know what they are,

but they're equally well-resolved

and complex.

So I think, conceivably, those could be predictive.

Because since it has the ability

to make forms

that look like forms that we're familiar with

in biology,

it's also making other forms that we're not familiar with.

And maybe it's the kind of forms

we'll discover underneath the surface of Mars,

where there are probably lakes

with fish swimming under the surface.

JH: Oh, let's hope so. Oh, my God, let's.

Oh, please, yes. Oh, I'm so there.

You know, it seems

at this stage in your life,

you also very personally

are in this state of confrontation

with a sort of dissonant --

I suppose it's an electromagnetic force

that somehow governs your Parkinson's

and this creative force

that is both the artist

who is in the here and now

and this sort of arc of your whole life.

Is that relevant to your work?

TS: As it turns out,

this device kind of comes in handy,

because I don't have to have

the fine motor skills to do,

that I can operate slides,

which is more of a mental process.

I'm looking at it and making decisions:

It needs more red, it needs more blue,

it needs a different shape.

And so I make these creative decisions

and can execute them

in a much, much simpler way.

I mean, I've got the symptoms.

I guess Parkinson's kind of creeps up over the years,

but at a certain point you start seeing the symptoms.

In my case,

my left hand has a significant tremor

and my left leg also.

I'm left-handed, and so I draw.

All my creations

really start on small drawings,

which I have thousands of,

and it's my way of just thinking.

I draw with a simple pencil,

and at first, the Parkinson's

was really upsetting,

because I couldn't get the pencil to stand still.

JH: So you're not a gatekeeper for these forces.

You don't think of yourself as the master of these forces.

You think of yourself as the servant.

TS: 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,

humans are of the universe.

The universe is in our mind,

and our minds are in the universe.

And we are expressions

of the universe, basically.

As humans,

ultimately being part of the universe,

we're kind of the spokespeople

or the observer part

of the constituency

of the universe.

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.

JH: Well, I love the idea

that somewhere within this idea

of fine motion and control

with the traditional skills

that you have with your hand,

some sort of more elemental force gets revealed,

and that's the beauty here.

Tom, thank you so much. It's been really, really great.

TS: Thank you, John.

(Applause)