Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Roberto Zenit

Researcher :: Professor of Engineering

“Artistic Painting & Fluid Mechanics”

Painting is, essentially a fluid mechanical problem. Much research has been devoted to understand the process of coating a solid surface with a fluid film, since most man-made surfaces are painted. In general, the objective of painting is to cover a solid surface with a thin and uniform layer of paint. For the case of artistic painting this is not exactly the case. Artists aim to create coating textures of aesthetic value to express their views. Hence, they learn to manipulate the fluid and the process in unique ways. They do this in an empirical manner through experimentation and many trial-and-error repetitions. Through a series of recent projects, inspired by art historians, my research group has been involved in the understanding the physical principles of the painting techniques used by famous modern painters. We have studied the accidental painting technique by David Alfaro Siqueiros, the dripping technique by Jackson Pollock and we have many other ongoing projects in this subject... https://vivo.brown.edu/display/rzenit#Research

Roberto Zenit is a full professor and Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Engineering at Brown University. He did his undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering at UNAM, Masters and PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Caltech, Postdoctoral training in Chemical Engineering at Cornell University. Main subject of Roberto’s research is Fluid Mechanics. His work is both experimental and theoretical, combining numerical simulations and diverse experimentation.