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Alumni Rewind: Revisiting Artist Cole Newman BA’22

By: Jeff Joiner | July 3, 2024

Paul and Avery Newman holding a certificate from Guinness World Records. A large crain can be seen in the background.
Cole Newman BA’22 and his wife, Avery Newman, hold a certificate from Guinness World Records recognizing the largest pendulum drip painting ever created.
Paul and Avery Newman holding a certificate from Guinness World Records. A large crain can be seen in the background.
Cole Newman BA’22 and his wife, Avery Newman, hold a certificate from Guinness World Records recognizing the largest pendulum drip painting ever created.
Paul and Avery Newman holding a certificate from Guinness World Records. A large crain can be seen in the background.
Cole Newman BA’22 and his wife, Avery Newman, hold a certificate from Guinness World Records recognizing the largest pendulum drip painting ever created.

Dallas artist Cole Newman BA’22 has big dreams. First featured here in a January Alumni Link article highlighting his success as a pendulum painter, Newman had his sights set on creating the largest drip painting recognized by Guinness World Records by 2026. He accomplished that feat this spring.

A crane holding a barrel of paint.
A crane was used to hoist a large drum filled with 110 gallons of paint and swing it over an enormous canvas to create the record-breaking painting.
A crane holding a barrel of paint.
A crane was used to hoist a large drum filled with 110 gallons of paint and swing it over an enormous canvas to create the record-breaking painting.
A crane holding a barrel of paint.
A crane was used to hoist a large drum filled with 110 gallons of paint and swing it over an enormous canvas to create the record-breaking painting.

“It’s the world’s largest dripping pendulum painting,” Newman said. “It was unbelievably difficult to put together and so many things went wrong, but it finally worked. It was fantastic.”

Imagine a gigantic 22,500-square-foot canvas laid out in a huge parking lot at Fair Park in Dallas with a construction crane towering over it, holding a 110-gallon drum filled with 1,100 pounds of white paint, and you’ve got a glimpse of what the scene looked like. Newman and a team of 30, many of whom were UTD students and alumni, took two days to prepare the site with the 150-by-150-foot canvas. And that didn’t include the two months it took Newman to coordinate logistics for the record attempt.

Newman discovered pendulum painting while a student at UT Dallas. He found online videos of an artist making paintings using cans of paint suspended over a canvas drizzling paint through a hole in the bottom. He was soon hooked by the method and not long after graduating from UT Dallas in 2022, he was working full time as an artist, selling his pendulum paintings through his website ColesColor.com and prolifically posting on social media.

Paul Newman posing next to a five-panel painting.
As a pendulum artist, Newman creates paintings in a variety of sizes, including this five-panel painting.

Ever since Newman became a successful artist, he has held onto a dream of breaking a world record for the largest drip pendulum painting. The dream became a reality this year when he partnered with Microsoft, which sponsored his record-breaking attempt in exchange for a TikTok video promoting Newman’s work and the release of a new Microsoft laptop. The company paid the estimated $109,000 it cost to stage the record-breaking event on May 18.

“I’ve been dreaming about doing this for years and for it to actually come to fruition is just unbelievable,” he said.

Aerial view of Cole Newman's drip painting.
A crowd of helpers joined Newman for an aerial shot of the world’s largest drip painting.

Newman rented a construction crane to suspend the 110-gallon drum held by a cable holding a specially designed steel frame above the enormous canvas made of 32 strips of canvas 150 feet long. A crane was necessary to swing the barrel and paint that together weighed more than 2,000 pounds.

On the day of the attempt, as a large audience watched, the crane operator swung the barrel spewing a stream of paint repeatedly across the canvas in arching swirls much like Newman’s more modest-sized pendulum paintings. After two passes the painting was complete, and an official with Guinness World Records, who was on-site and measured the canvas, declared the painting a new world record.

“It was a very cool feeling,” Newman said. “The Guinness [representative] presented us with a world record plaque on-site, which was amazing.”

Also amazing was the fact that Newman pulled off the record attempt just three weeks after he and his fiancée, Avery, were married. It’s been a remarkable spring for Newman who broke a world record, got married and surpassed the 1 million subscriber mark on his YouTube account, ColesColor.

“It’s been an incredible time for a guy who just likes to have fun making swirly paintings,” Newman said.