A Painter Creates Abstract Resin Paintings That Look Like Their Own Worlds

Instead of going the traditional route with a brush, Chicago-based artist Bruce Riley creates his organic, abstract paintings by pouring and dripping resin onto canvases. The buildup of the many colors of resin allows not only for vibrantly-colored forms that recall cell structures and colorful life forms, but the material also allows for light to bounce around inside the layers of color, creating new ways to see the composition depending on the lighting and shadows.

Riley starts his paintings by pouring resin onto a canvas to achieve a glassy-smooth, black surface. From there, layers of colored resin are added by pouring, dripping and dotting, slowly building up into layers of colors and shapes.

His work is almost like a physical meditation, with the large, horizontally-oriented canvases requiring a significant amount of motion. At the same time, Riley describes the process as a “flow,” an intuitive approach to artmaking that must be felt in the moment rather than premeditated. “It’s obvious when it works,” he says, “and it’s obvious when it fails.”

Because the work is so spontaneous, errant drips and unintentional results are part of the process, and Riley gamely works with them. Because his art evolves before his own eyes during the making process, the “mistakes” end up informing the outcome of the piece, and pushing it in new and perhaps unexpected directions. Riley is perfectly fine with this, as it meshes with his intuitive, go-with-the-flow approach towards painting. “I’m not really trying to define any ideas,” he says. “I just let it flow.”

Riley is a prolific artist, and you can check out more of his work, as well as some incredible detail shots that are works of art on their own, on his Flickr.