Gulf of Mexico Spill Inspires Digitally Produced "Oil Paintings"

Well that didn't take long. The disastrous spill in the Gulf of Mexico has inspired its first artistic masterpiece: Deep Horizon, a series of "oil paintings" created by digital artist Ubermorgan.

The paintings are actually drawn from images of the disaster, which have then been digitally manipulated with compression effects and video-editing. Thus, the colors in the images take on a distorted, liquefied effect--like a real-life oil painting. According to Ubermorgan, the oil spill itself is essentially a huge drawing, done by BP, using millions of gallons of oil on a canvas of tens of thousands of miles of open sea.

Grim stuff, made all the more unsettling by the visual enchantment of the images--and the real-world devastation it abstracts.

View more of the works at Today and Tomorrow.