About: Artist

For fifty years Eric M. Gordon designed molecules. Now he designs the conditions under which they make images.

Eric earned his Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale. Over a career in drug discovery he worked at a major pharmaceutical company, founded three biotech startups, spent a decade as a venture capitalist and served as an Adjunct Professor at Stanford. He holds more than 100 U.S. patents and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers.

In the last decade he returned to art full time, developing a way of painting on horizontal glass plates that captures kinetic interactions impossible at an easel. That work led to Self-Assembly Art, his own approach to science art, in which inks, pigments and solvents organize themselves under the laws of physics and chemistry.

He works from two studios at his home in Palo Alto, one for painting and one for printing and framing. His practice is fueled by joy and curiosity, and he hopes to share that sense of discovery and delight through his work.