A decade ago, Corinna Nicole saw a video of a murmuration for the first time.

“This is not real; this cannot be real. To see this huge flock of birds just creating these amazing, mesmerizing shapes in the sky,” Nicole said. “I looked into it more, and I was like, ‘no, this is really a thing, and I’ve got to make a painting about it.’”

Ten years later, Nicole is still creating art depicting Swarm Behavior.

“I thought it was gonna be just a one off, a gotta get it out my system type of thing, you know, and just never stopped from there,” she said.

Before her Swarm art, Nicole painted the human form.

“When I did that first painting, I kind of like slowly transitioned into it. I was still doing figurative art, but every now and then I would make a swarm or murmuration painting,” Nicole said.

In the last three or four years, she has turned her focus to creating her Swarm art.

“Now this is pretty much all I do,” she said.

“I was inspired by, like, the interconnectedness of the collective mind,” she explained. “How they’re influenced by each other, how they respond to each other.”

She went on to explain, “just thinking about that connection, power of influence, and also thinking about how humans operate in the same way when we are influenced by each other, you know, good or bad.”

Nicole creates her Swarm art with two different techniques.

For stippling, she uses ink to place one dot at a time and build up the values until she obtains the depth she is looking for.

For her paint pieces, she uses what she calls controlled splatter.

“I control the general area and the general direction of the dots,” she said.

She will use a paintbrush and another tool to create the splatter.

“I just build up layers and layers. I do a layer, let it dry, do another layer, let it dry, and just keep building up until I get the depth that I want,” she said.

While for some pieces, Nicole will get her inspiration from watching videos of murmurations, others come from her head.

“A lot of times I kind of will just visualize a shape in my head, or I’ll do what I call dancing with my paintbrush,” she said. “I’ll kind of just envision ‘okay, how do I want this swarm to look’ and I’ll just do like this dance with my hands until I like see a shape and then I’ll try to recreate that with the splatter.”

Whenever she uses a video for initial inspiration, she will wait until she sees a shape that she likes and then go from there.

Sometimes her Swarms are more influenced by background information.

“I feel like I have two pretty distinct directions, like the more abstract where I kind of take out all of the negative space and really focus on the shape itself, and then I have the more representational where you’ve got the landscape or the seascape, and I’ll use that background information to kind of inform the direction of the Swarm,” she explained.

For Nicole, the most challenging part is knowing when to stop.

“What happens a lot of times when I do the stippling is I’ll go into like this zen mode where I kind of go into another world, another realm,” she said. “I’ll be thinking about something else, but I’m still working, and so I have to kind of like check myself to see where I am, so it can be very easy for me to overwork it sometimes.”

Nicole can be found at the Lowe Mill in Huntsville in studio 118. Her Instagram is corinnanicole.art and www.corinna-nicole.com