With the exception of Bobbito Garcia’s Martinez Gallery, which closed last year, Greenpoint has never had much of an art scene. The immigrant Polish community there has managed to maintain its hold on the neighborhood despite repeated attempts by hipsters from trendy Williamsburg to move north along the banks of the East River. “It’s not as isolated as people think,” Chris Burnside said. “And the community is very cool.”

The 31-year-old artist has been living in the neighborhood for three years. His floor-through apartment isn’t nearly big enough for the 25-foot installations that have become his preferred form of expression. The walls in every room are covered with a collection of vibrant compass drawings and freehand watercolors. The two styles make for an unlikely nexus, and yet Mr. Burnside manages to make them work well together when given the proper amount of wall space.

The two styles can be traced back to Mr. Burnside’s early days on the not-so-mean streets of Seattle, where he was born and raised. He began playing saxophone at age 15, three years before he started pursuing art as a career. The free-flowing styles of sax legends like Joe Henderson and John Coltrane are a clear inspiration for the gestures he creates with watercolors. “There’s an incredible amount of discipline involved at the foundation of music,” he said. “With those tools comes ultimate freedom of expression, and I try to think about that in the studio.”

In 1991, he continued on to the University of Washington, and his interest in art took the pole position away from music. Five years later, he left campus with a bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Unsure of his next move, he worked in construction for two years. His compass drawings are systematic studies of depth and perception. The layers of overlapping circles create geometric shapes like columns and spheres that are a nod to his hands-on architectural experience, as well as to Piet Mondrian, whom Mr. Burnside counts as one of his biggest influences (along with Cy Twombly). The technique of using a compass to make art may seem mechanical, but Mr. Burnside doesn’t see it that way. “Using a compass is no different than using a paintbrush,” he explained. “They’re both tools used to create art.”

What’s more important than how he makes them is that they demonstrate the difference between man and machine. “It’s a way of exploring my own humanity,” he said “No matter how careful I am, I always make mistakes. And when I do, I fill them in with color. Those mistakes are what makes it art because that’s the human element at play. That’s what differentiates people from machines.”

It wasn’t until 2001, when he graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters in Fine Arts, that he began moving to installations from paintings on canvas. Since then, he’s done one each year, including at the Nexus Foundation in Philadelphia and the Kresge Gallery at Ramapo College. All the installations take up a space that’s roughly 20 by 10 feet and work in three dimensions, extending on two walls and the floor or two walls and the ceiling.

The extended space and additional dimension allow Mr. Burnside to juxtapose elements of fluid motion from his watercolors with the more architecturally minded constructions from his compass drawings. The result is a potent combination of abstract and geometrical figures that pulls the viewer into the artwork. “Chris conceives of the viewer as an active participant in the process,” said Adam Sheffer, a director at Cheim & Read gallery on West 25th Street. “It’s a collaboration between creator and viewer. There’s interest in wall drawings as installation, like the work of Barry McGee, and Chris is carving out a niche for himself in this arena.”

It requires an extreme amount of intensity to create installations of this magnitude, and an equal amount of inner peace to break them down. After all, when an exhibit ends, the installation doesn’t go into storage like a painting: It gets disassembled.

“There’s something disheartening about the fact that my works disappear forever,” Mr. Burnside said. “But it’s a great tradeoff to have a large space to work with but know you can’t keep it forever. Hopefully, I’ll get to a level where people will let me keep the space.” In the meantime, it’s back to the familiar environs of Greenpoint, where, some place on Manhattan Avenue, Mr. Burnside is hard at work on his next big idea.