Standing with his arms to his side, his eyse squinting and head slightly tilted to the left, Charlie Risselada was staring down the blank canvas before him.

It wouldn't be blank much longer. IN fact, it wouldn't be blank in about two seconds. That's when Risselada began pouring his paint into the 4-foot by 6-foot canvas.

Hovering over the canvas, in his hand a cut-off bottom of a plastic milk carton as his paint container, he smeared inky-black paint in wide swatch to sections of the wooden surface.

Risselada stood back and looked over his work, which at that point looked more like the effort of a 3-year-old child. He mixed some white paint with water and poured it over the canvas. Some of it mixed with the black; some of it stood alone.

Then came the teal, the yellow, the pink. Next was the green and purple. Finally the orange. It all ended up mixing and melding and swirling into a mix of color that seemed to be moving before Risselada's very eyes.

The painting seemed to be forming on its own.

"I think I'll stop at this point," Risselada said. "I'll come back later and then I'll see what's happened."

IN THE POUR HOUSE
Risselada specializes in what he calls "poured painting," something he started doing in graduate school at the Maryland Institute College of Art 20 years ago.

He was the only one doing it then and, as far as he knows, is the only one doing it now.

"I was always interested in using pain as a material, not just being on the end of a brush," Risselada said. "With these, you can never really tell what's about to form before you. You control it to a degree. And then it controls you."

The way his poured paintings are created is deceptively simple. Rissleada pours latex paint onto large, three-dimensional wooden surfaces that depict land formations. Right now, he's working on an eight-part series based on sections of the Chesapeake Bay.

His unique process has several steps. First he looks over navigational maps, some slightly yellowed, of the Chesapeake Bay area, maps that show tight inlets and land masses that look oddly arty even on their own, with their fingerlike islands and oddly curved land jutting in the bay.

He cordons off a particular section that he finds intriguing on the map, photocopies it, projects it onto a wall and uses a jigsaw to cut out portions on a wooden surface. He then glues that surface to a blank wooden canvas.

And then he pours and pours and pours and pours. It's not rare to use as many as 10 different colors at a time, mixing some colors and adding water to others. He always has a lot of paint to work with. One hundred cans of paint sit on the floor of his working space, a 1920s red bank barn in Hampstead.

He's never quite sure how a painting will look when he starts. Even halfway through, when he waits for the swirls to swirl and the mixtures to mix, he won't know what he'll soon see. Risselada has a particular eye for what works, though, and how to pour to get a particular color effect.

The result is something that looks like water on the side of the road that has been mixed with chemicals, or oil, creating a cvertain iridescene that shines when hit by the sun.

They also look like abstract representations of landmasses, part of Risselada's intention, even though, strangely, he isn't that interested in geography. He's instead interested in how topographic maps look like art. Effectively, he turns maps into art in a random, fun and attention-grabbing way.

Call it swirls of color. Call it a bit confusing. Call it brilliant. Call it controlled chaos.

Whatever it is, it's pure Charlie Risselada.

"This work is something that pulls me along to the next project," Risselada said. "You always want to go to that next painting, if just to see what happens next."

Risselada grew up in Holland, Michigan, a long way away from the bay he's now depicting in his art.

He can't recall a particular moment that he knew he'd be an artist. He said he's always had the talent, something he noticed as a small boy drawing more realistic things, like images from nature.

As an undergraduate at the Cleveland Institute of Art, he was a painting major and sculpture minor, which may explain why he uses 3-D elements in his work today.

He developed his style on his own while obtaining his degree at MICA. He didn't have a teacher to guide the way when it came to poured paintings. He didn't have a fellow student to compare technique. Risselada did it, and continues to do it on his own.

It takes a little bit of concentration mixed with a lot of playful experimentation while working on a poured painting. In the 45 minutes or so he took to finish the first step of number four in his Chesapeake Bay series, he stepped away and back to the surface at least 30 times.

Risselada looks to see how the pouring blends the colors, what shapes it makes and doesn't make. If he likes what he sees, he highlights certain sections with colors that define them better. If he doesn't like what he sees, he covers it over with a new color or sucks it up with an electric Shop-Vac.

"Now I'm beginning to see where it can go," Risselada said, about 15 minutes into his new work. Purple and white were dominating, but then Risselada added a bit of yellow, pink - a risky but wonderful color to add, he said - and orange.

So much of the painting is design and so much is chance that you have to be patient and focused with the work as well as be accepting of where the pouring leads you.

Risselada, who, when not painting, works fulltime helping to run Tersiguel's, a French-country restaurant in Ellicott City, said he likes the interactive quality of the painting, how it moves and keeps him moving. With each new swath of color, the painting is altered in some unexpected way. And Risselada is always ready for the ride.

"There's an element of play to it that I love," Risselada said. "It keeps you on your toes."

And sometimes it keeps you on a ladder. That's where Risselada climbed a dew times to check out his work from above, to see his swirls from a distance to determine out they might look flat on a wall.

After putting in a few touches, filling in some gaps with teal and orange and sucking up a few areas with the Shop-Vac, Risselada seems pleased with his work - temporarily that is.

"We'll see what happens." he said. "Right now I'm going to wash my hands."

LISTENING TO HIS ART
Risselada will let the painting sit for three hours and then see what he has. Sometimes his favorite original swirls have vanished and sometimes new patterns have formed.

It's just a part of his work that he's come to expect, this not quite knowing what will happen part.

But Risselada is patient. He understand that his style doesn't often lend itself to perfection and that's why he doesn't go into a project expecting something to come out a specific way.

"You just never know, but they always come out in interesting ways," he said. "There's always something new to discover, a pattern or color mix."

After his Chesapeake Bay series is completed, Risselada will continue his poured paintings that reflect landmasses. They may be Maryland-centered or he may use maps of other landmasses that catch his fancy.

But whatever will grab his interest, Risselada will always be pouring from cut-off plastic milk cartons. His colors will always mix in offbeat ways. Some will be specks of orange mixing with streams of teal or black marbleizing with green.

And Risselada will always be along for the unpredictable artistic ride.

"You have to be in the right frame of mind to do this," he said. "If you're not patient, if you aren't creative, it won't work. You have to listen to it."