How Artist Cole Newman Lets It Fly

That day in 2016 at the Dallas Museum of Art is one that Cole Newman BA’22 says ended up changing his life. Standing before Jackson Pollock’s huge “Cathedral” painting, Newman realized that art involved so much more than simply drawing pretty pictures. In that moment he realized that his future would somehow take place on canvas.

“That’s when it clicked for me,” Newman said. “It was so cool standing there looking at an abstract piece of art that was held in such high regard. I also really like Pablo Picasso’s work and I love his quote, ‘Anything you can imagine is real.’ If I can think of it, I can create it. That is the truth of my art.”

Newman began painting seriously in 2019 while a student at The University of Texas at Dallas. But with the world consumed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Newman decided he needed a break from school and quit for a time to pursue painting. He soon returned to UTD where he finished his bachelor’s degree with majors in chemistry and business from the School of Interdisciplinary Studies in 2022.

It was around this time that he discovered an online video of an artist creating pieces via a bucket of paint suspended and swinging from the ceiling, the paint drizzling out a hole in the bottom of the bucket –– a technique called pendulum painting. The video proved to be another personal epiphany, laying a path for Newman to combine a “wildly enjoyable” medium with social media content creation.

Newman’s mother actually discovered his abilities as a pendulum artist after he and a friend turned Newman’s UT Dallas apartment into a temporary studio in order to create their first pendulum painting using a red Solo cup with a hole in the bottom filled with acrylic house paint.  Newman displayed the finished piece in his apartment but didn’t give it much thought until his mother saw it.

“My mom immediately wanted one for our living room in Austin,” Newman said. “She went out and bought canvas and told me to do whatever I wanted. So during a visit home, I put trash bags down all over our garage and used a coffee can with a hole in it and let it fly. My mom recorded it, and we posted it to Instagram.”

A friend of Newman’s saw the Instagram post and suggested he post it on TikTok.

“So I posted it, and it got like half a million views and like 5,000 followers, which I now know is really nothing,” Newman said. “But at the time, it was like the coolest thing ever.”

With that TikTok post, Newman’s career as an artist and social media influencer was launched.

“That was the light bulb moment for me – when I realized I could make a living creating content,” he said. “It lit a fire under me, and I started posting four or five videos a day of my paintings while destroying my parent’s garage.”

By now, Newman estimates he’s done videos of more than 800 paintings and his social media numbers have only grown with each new post. He decided to explain how he creates a pendulum painting by adding voice-over to the original Instagram video and posting it again. This time it got 26 million views, and he gained 300,000 followers overnight. His top YouTube post to date, titled simply “Hello Friends,” has been viewed 147 million times and received 3.2 million likes.

Newman sells paintings to collectors across the United States who have seen his social media posts, but most of his income as an artist now comes from ad revenue and brand deals via his various social media platforms.

Since his digital presence has exploded, Newman has worked to make his videos and his paintings more varied and entertaining to watch. He works using a variety of colors and canvas backgrounds and recently began experimenting with 3D printing to make objects to paint with. The unstable urn, as he calls one plastic 3D printed object, squirts paint out holes in its sides when suspended from a pole that Newmans twirls over a canvas.

“It’s crazy being able to draw some polygons in computer software and click print and in two hours this 3D-printed contraption that I can paint with will be in my hands,” he said.

Much of Newman’s inspiration, though, comes from a Home Depot near his Dallas studio. He likes to wander through the store looking for objects that he can use to paint with or on – wicker baskets, panes of glass and arrangements of flooring tiles. Newman once took a leaf blower attached to a paint can suspended over a canvas and turned it on only to watch the machine fly around his studio in out-of-control chaos. The experiment threw more paint on the studio’s walls and on Newman than on the canvas. He was particularly proud of the TikTok post, though, because it received a warning from the platform about the dangers of the stunt.

Newman also organizes painting events for groups who watch him make pendulum paintings and listen to his commentary about his life and work. He once organized an event to produce his largest painting to date for a patron from Palm Springs, California, who agreed to the idea of watching Newman paint her 20-by-8-foot commission live with an audience watching. The event was a huge success, he said.

Always thinking about the next event or video of a painting to post, Newman is in the early stages of organizing a public attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the largest painting ever created, currently recorded at 17,000 square feet. He plans to create a 20,000-square-feet pendulum painting (about the size of a hockey rink) by suspending a 55-gallon drum filled with paint from a construction crane and swinging it over a single canvas. He hopes to make the attempt in 2026.

Oddly enough, Newman’s art is controversial with a number of social media comments coming from detractors who claim he’s not really an artist. The negative comments don’t bother Newman, though, who says the controversy and online debates about what is and isn’t art only add to how viral his posts go. He says he is comfortable with his art and with the notion that he’s inspiring others online to pursue their own creativity.

“I’m definitely an artist and I think everyone’s an artist,” Newman said. “Everyone has the capacity to create. Too many people have a mindset that they could never do that because they’re not a creative person. But that’s not true. You just have to have the confidence to try something that you enjoy.”

Visit ColesColor.com to see more of Newman’s work and find links to his social media platforms.

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