In his acrylic work Christopher employs an ‘action painting’ technique not unlike that used by the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock in the late 1940’s. He throws and drips the paint onto the canvas instead of brushing it directly on, thus never actually touching its surface.

It was not Pollock’s artwork specifically which led Christopher to employ the technique, but rather a masters thesis written by physicist and chaos theory mathematician Richard Taylor in 1999:

Taylor discovered, through computer scanning and conversion to mathematical formula, that a Pollock painting and a photo of, say, a dense forest shared a commonality. The random patterns that had been created in the artwork mimicked the seemingly random ones found in nature, and Taylor suggested that by employing the use of gravity in his technique, Pollock further increased the incidence of these naturally occurring patterns. Taylor went on to speculate that because humans are creatures of nature that these fractal patterns have an innate tendency to attract our gaze.

As a frequent traveler to remote natural areas, Christopher wondered whether he could employ an action painting technique but use it to paint in a representational manner. He found he has been able to create a type of vibration and movement in the work that can’t be achieved by traditional painting methods.