The Chemistry of Art: Mica Powders and Crystallization

When Martin Eichinger talks about epoxy resin, he sounds as much like a curious experimenter as he does an artist. His studio is lined with jars of mica powders, dyes, glass spheres, and a growing collection of test panels—evidence of just how deep he’s gone into understanding how these materials behave.

“I’ve probably done a hundred of these things,” he says. “Just testing what happens. What does mica do? What does glitter do? What do fiberglass strands do? You learn by watching.”

Those experiments revealed something important: epoxy doesn’t sit still. It reacts. It moves. It shifts on its own timeline.

“The thing about epoxy is that it doesn’t just dry,” he says. “It changes. It keeps moving for hours.”

That’s where mica comes in. What looks like simple pigment actually behaves like a mineral should—it aligns, layers, and begins forming crystalline structures as the resin cures. A pour that begins glossy and flat slowly transforms into a layered, almost cosmic surface.

“Mica wants to line up with itself,” Eichinger explains. “It creates these little formations. You don’t control it. You just set it up and let it go.”

The curing process usually takes six to eight hours. In that window, temperature, humidity, and density all influence how the mica arranges. Eichinger likes the uncertainty. It keeps him engaged.

“It’s not like paint,” he says. “You don’t mix a color and know what you’ll get. You come back the next morning, and it’s different.”

Eichinger adding glass beads, dyes, and other ingredients to an unnamed epoxy resin piece.

He pushes the material even further by adding glass beads, dyes, and other ingredients. Each reacts differently inside the resin. Glass beads, for example, naturally settle into tight geometric clusters—tiny hexagonal patterns that echo how molecules organize in nature.

“If you spread the glass beads out just right, they sort of snap into this little honeycomb pattern,” he says. “It just happens. You don’t force it.”

This interplay between chance and structure mirrors what fascinates Eichinger about the universe itself. He spends a lot of time looking at imagery from NASA, especially from the James Webb Telescope, and sees a familiar logic in how matter organizes at every scale.

“When I watch the mica settle, it feels connected to the same processes out there,” he says. “Things want to organize. They want to create structure.”

His resin panels are built on that idea. Layer by layer, he pours the materials and steps back. The chemistry takes over. The resin records the entire reaction, freezing it at the moment it stops moving.

“You give the material time,” he says, “and it shows you what it wants to do.”

The finished works are full of small surprises—pools where mica gathered, streaks where particles drifted, clusters that formed all on their own. They don’t look painted; they look grown.

And that’s what Eichinger loves about this new phase of his work. It’s not just art—it’s a collaboration with natural forces on a smaller scale.

“I’m just letting the chemistry reveal itself,” he says. “And honestly, it’s pretty amazing to watch.”

Capturing the Other Side of Outer Space

When Martin Eichinger began experimenting with epoxy resin, he wasn’t just changing mediums—he was changing how he saw. After four decades of sculpting narrative bronze figures, Eichinger turned his focus outward, toward light, movement, and the mysteries of space.

“I’m in love with outer space,” he says. “What the James Webb Telescope has been able to provide in terms of seeing way back into the history of our universe—it’s extraordinary.”

That sense of awe became the foundation of his new work. Each epoxy piece begins as a study in what can’t be seen directly: light traveling for billions of years, galaxies forming and dissolving, the slow choreography of the cosmos revealed through color and chemistry.

M42 The Orion Nebula isn’t flat at all. I used to see images like this as 2D, but they’re fully three-dimensional—what looks like a glowing donut is actually a slice through a sphere. Once you see it that way, the whole thing shifts.

Epoxy resin, with its depth and transparency, became the perfect medium for that pursuit. Unlike bronze, which hardens through heat, resin comes to life over time—its surface evolving as it cures. “Glass melts,” Eichinger explains, “but epoxy crystallizes. It changes chemically. You can watch it happen.”

As the resin sets, mica powders inside it align and harden into intricate crystalline structures, creating a kind of cosmic micro-landscape. “They take six or eight hours to create their pattern,” he says. “When you put them in, you don’t know what it’s going to look like eight hours later.”

The process mirrors the natural laws that fascinate him most—order emerging from chaos. “Mica wants to layer itself,” Eichinger says. “It creates lines and patterns, just like gases and dust align in space.”

Each piece is built from both sides of a transparent acrylic frame, so light can move through it freely. Depending on where you stand, the view shifts—sometimes luminous and dense, sometimes ghostly and distant. “We can’t stand on the other side of space to see what it looks like,” Eichinger says. “But we can imagine it has two sides. That’s what I’m trying to capture.”

In the studio, color, glass, and mica are poured in layers that react on their own terms. The results are unpredictable, which is part of the appeal. “It’s like being a painter without having to mix paints,” he says. “The chemistry does the blending for me.”

The finished works feel alive. Patterns seem to drift and pulse as the light changes, revealing hidden structures beneath the surface. No two pieces behave the same—each one records a moment of transformation frozen in motion.

Eichinger no longer sculpts stories of people but of processes. His art now speaks to the same balance that defines the universe: control meeting chaos, precision meeting chance.

“We’re looking back in time,” he says of both the telescopes that inspire him and the resin that traps his shifting light. “The universe is evolving, and so is the work.”

From Bronze to Epoxy: Reinventing a Career in Color

For decades, Martin Eichinger told stories in bronze—sculptures grounded in myth, movement, and emotion. His figures carried the weight of narrative and time. But after forty years of that precision and permanence, Eichinger wanted something else: unpredictability.

The answer came through epoxy resin, a material that refuses to sit still. It moves, cures, transforms, and grows on its own schedule, pulling the artist into collaboration with chemistry. Where bronze demanded mastery, epoxy demanded surrender.

Eichinger’s studio now feels as much like a lab as an atelier. Rows of mica powders, glass spheres, and dyes line his workspace—tools for experiments that can take hours to unfold. He’s created more than a hundred test pieces, studying how light and time shape the outcome. “The mica wants to layer itself,” he says. “It creates lines and patterns you can’t predict. You come back the next morning, and it’s changed completely.”

The unpredictability isn’t a flaw—it’s the point. Each piece becomes a record of transformation, a collaboration between intention and natural process. “Epoxy is magical in a lot of different ways,” he says. “It evolves. It changes as it cures.”

That constant evolution mirrors the subject that fuels this new direction: outer space. Eichinger has long followed the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, drawn to how they capture time itself—light traveling billions of years before reaching our eyes. His epoxy work channels that same wonder.

His new pieces aren’t depictions of outer space so much as portals through it. The layered resin creates a sense of depth that lets the viewer look through the image instead of at it — as if seeing the universe from inside, rather than observing it from afar.

Technically, the work has evolved alongside the concept. Early on, Eichinger poured resin into rubber molds—the same method he used for bronze—but soon realized that flexibility and transparency couldn’t coexist that way. He began pouring directly onto framed acrylic panels instead, treating each one like a suspended canvas. The result is artwork that doesn’t sit on a wall so much as floats in space.

Epoxy also shifted his sense of time. A bronze piece might take months to cast and finish; resin reveals its character overnight. “Eight hours compared to bronze is really fast,” he says, laughing. But speed isn’t what excites him—it’s discovery. “When you put it in, you don’t know what it’s going to look like eight hours later.”

That element of surprise has rekindled his sense of play. After a lifetime mastering permanence, Eichinger is now working in impermanence—where the story isn’t just what’s made, but how it comes into being. “I still think of these as sculptures,” he says. “But they’re not sculptures in the same way.”

The shift from bronze to epoxy isn’t about abandoning one medium for another; it’s about perspective. The same hands that once shaped mythic figures are now shaping light. The same instinct for storytelling remains, only the language has changed.

“The bronze was a wonderful way for me to spend my career,” Eichinger says. “But this—this is something else.”