Amy Lin starts with a blank white sheet of paper. She grabs her colored pencils, adds a few dots and goes from there. There's no draft and no preconceived ideas.
"I don't normally have an idea of what it's going to look like, so it's all sort of a surprise," Lin said. "It keeps it fresh. It's more fun that way but it's also more risky.
Her new show, "Kinetics," runs through April 24 at Addison/Ripley Fine Art (1670 Wisconsin Ave. N.W.), and Lin herself will appear Saturday, March 27 between 4 and 6 p.m.
The drawings -- swirls of lines and dots -- can mean different things to different people, picking up themes from physics, chemistry or human movement.
"There are some pieces in the show I push that a little more, like 'Sequencing,' which can have a laymen's term, but it also can represent DNA," she said. "The whole idea behind the dots can represent many different things, like molecules or particles, but I think of them as little beings."
Lin adopted the style in 2004, and each piece takes between 50 and 300 hours to complete. But the way she works keeps it all full of surprises. "My mood can influence the colors I choose and also in the way the composition turns out. Although sometimes there's one that goes into the 'never going to be seen by anyone' pile," she said, laughing.
