Paul Petersen (aka Spherical Art) has had a long journey from studying painting at UCLA to minting digital art of mesmerizing geometric shapes. After graduating university, he worked as a sign painter and in print shops to make ends meet, and then got a job as an art director at an ad agency in New York City. Eventually, he ended up back in Southern California and learned Photoshop to create medical illustrations for an agency. Through that learning process, he fell in love with digital art and started creating work for about a decade and posting it on social media.
In 2018, SuperRare contacted him and suggested that he mint some NFTs of his artwork. After applying in 2019, he got immersed in the NFT community and never looked back. Many of his works are captured from the inside of a virtual geometric sphere and then animating them with flashes of color, producing a hypnotic and dazzling effect. In this conversation, we chat about his creative process, his fascination with spheres, and his latest series Color Roulette.
Chris Kokiousis: Let’s set the stage — what is “spherical art”? How would you explain it to someone for the first time?
Spherical Art: Well, if you took a sphere, and you put a virtual camera inside the sphere — and I do that in a 3D program, so I make a virtual geometric sphere and I put a camera inside — the images just appear. It’s like I’m discovering them instead of making them.
Of course, I make this sphere, but once I put the camera in there and move it around and play with the settings of the sphere and the settings of the camera, all kinds of strange images appear that I didn’t expect. So it’s always an adventure doing that.
Now you might be familiar with the giant sphere that’s at Disney World, right? At the Epcot Center. There’s a giant ball there that’s sort of like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, if you will. So, those facets can be manipulated. Like vertices of those facets can be drawn in to be spiky or they can be twisted. You can distort the sphere and then you get even more interesting patterns…
So the pattern that the sphere has is transferred to the objects that occupy those vertices. And so that creates a pattern. And in 3D cameras, you have a perspective camera or an orthographic camera, but they also have a spherical camera. And that’s the kind of camera they use when they make a map, or you’ve seen those 3D, 360-degree videos where you can spin around in a room.
Chris Kokiousis: Is that what they use for the Google car? Street view?
Spherical Art: Yes. And if you go to a real estate site, and you go to look at a house online, they’ll have pictures of the inside of the house where you can move around and see them. Those are still images, but they’re panoramic. So you can spin around and see them. So I can use that type of a camera as well and then flatten that image out, and basically that’s how I got the image…But almost all the images that I make — including the latest series Color Roulette — that’s all done with images that were derived from inside of a sphere.
So Color Roulette, what that’s about is I take these images and they’re stills, but I really like color. I hardly ever do monochromatic pieces. I really like color. So the 3D program that I use can assign colors to all those spherical parts. All those little facets. It can assign colors to them in the color wheel based on their angle. So, if the face is like a 45 degree angle to the camera, it gets assigned a certain color, and if it’s 48 degrees, it gets a different color.
So now I have the camera assigning all these colors. Well, once I get it, I take that image and I put it into After Effects. Over a period of time, I can shift all the colors and what happens on some of these that look like roulette wheels, is they spin around. The colors make the image appear that it’s spinning, but it’s not, but I like that effect. So I’m sort of exploring different images to see what kinds of movement I can get. And they’re not always rotational; sometimes they flow from top to bottom or left, right? It’s just fascinating to me.
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, they’re really fun to just zone out and look at, and also the fact that the color is changing inside of the object while it’s spinning is cool. When did you first find yourself so fascinated with geometric shapes?
Spherical Art: Well, I guess when I was in high school, I was really bad at math, and I still am. I hate algebra and stuff like that…but I love geometry. I always liked geometry and I got a good grade in it in school. So that was weird. I like it because you could see the shapes, so I’m visually oriented. So I could see a triangle of a certain type and I could identify it, and I liked my protractor, and I like half circles and things like that. I could understand them.
So when I started doing this with these geometric spheres and putting cameras in there, I noticed that they’re all basically made out of triangles. They always seemed to be made out of triangles. That’s the smallest shape you can make, is a triangle.
What’s interesting is there’s a mathematical pattern in different types of spheres, you know. If they’re based on hexagons, or they’re based on dodecahedrons, or they’re based on different octahedrons, for example, that have more sides, each of those things has a pattern. And that pattern, no matter how you torture it, always comes through. It may not look the same, but it’s an interesting pattern. It’s sort of like finding patterns in nature, you know.
Chris Kokiousis: Right.
Spherical Art: Like, you look at a flower, you look at a bee’s honeycomb. You see all these hexagons stacked up on top of each other, where the honey is. And it’s interesting to me. I look for shapes like that in the world. When I see a cloud or I see stuff, I’m looking for shapes that I can find a pattern…
It’s like when you’re a little kid and you’re sleeping in a room with wallpaper, and the wallpaper’s kind of abstract, or maybe it has objects in it. But when you look at it, your mind starts to see shapes and things that are there, you know, like looking at clouds. People look at clouds and they see a dog’s face or they see a heart or they see a baby, different things like that. So, a lot of the work that I do involves trying to intuit what I’m looking at, trying to figure out what it is that I’m looking at, and then I try to make it a little bit more like that thing.
Chris Kokiousis: Okay last question — it came to mind while we were talking. Have you ever lived inside of a geodesic dome?
Spherical Art: Well, it’s funny — when I lived in New York City, of course, everybody starts off in a tiny little apartment. But I was living in like a brownstone on the Upper West Side, and I wanted to get a better apartment.
One day, I heard the people who were down living on the bottom floor were arguing — a couple. They were having a fight, and I could hear them fighting as I went up the staircase. So I thought, maybe they’re having a problem with their relationship. Maybe they’ll move out of that apartment. And sure enough, that week, the guy who I had spoke to a few times, told me that his girlfriend was moving out. He was going to be there by himself, but he didn’t want to be there by himself. So he was going to leave too.
So I didn’t say anything to him about the apartment, but then I knew that the apartment was managed by a company. So I called the company and I said, You know, there’s an apartment that’s going to be empty pretty soon. And so you’ll have an opportunity to lease it out to somebody. And if you lease it out to me, you’ll have two apartments turning over, and you can raise the rent on both of them.
Chris Kokiousis: Hmmm.
Spherical Art: So then, that jumped me to the front of the line, because they always have a list of people who want apartments. So because they could get two empty apartments, I would move out of mine and get a new renter, and then I would move into the ground floor. Well, the ground floor apartment not only was bigger, but it had a backyard! A backyard in New York City.
Chris Kokiousis: Wow…
Spherical Art: So I had like a 20 foot by 40 foot backyard outside of my tiny one bedroom with a kitchenette. So, yeah, now I could have put up an umbrella, have summer parties, you know. I could do stuff socially in that apartment.
So one of the things I did in the winter is, I was looking through some magazine and I saw a geodesic dome made out of plastic and PVC tubing, and you could use it as a greenhouse. And it looked like a hexagon sort of shape. It had five-sided shapes like half of a soccer ball. So I bought it and I put it up, and it had plastic walls that let the light in, and I had a little heater that I had on the inside and I kept my plants outside in that thing all through the winter in New York City.
So people would look down at me. Well, people in the neighborhood in the backyard, you know, the buildings surrounding me could see my yard, and they’d see the dome down there, and it was a curiosity. But I kept it there for a few years. So, that was my refuge outside in the winter, in New York City, to be in that dome.
Chris Kokiousis: So it was big enough so you could actually stand or hang out in it?
Spherical Art: Oh, it was 12 feet tall.
Chris Kokiousis: Oh wow.
Spherical Art: And it was at a 12 foot diameter. So I had a lot of plants in there. I had a table in there; a table and chairs.
Chris Kokiousis: That’s amazing.
Spherical Art: Yeah, and you could take it apart. It had little hubs that the PVC pipe would snap into. So you could take it apart, take the skin off. Yeah. So that was fun.
Chris Kokiousis: Very cool.
Spherical Art: Yeah, it would be neat to live in a dome, because it’s like living in a loft. You have a lot of space.
