Sunday, September 02, 2007
Art meets science at Virginia Tech
Christian Trejbal
Recent columns
- The Black House won't restore itself
- When dogs attack goats, taxpayers pay
- Keeping e-mail private
- Protect your head in a moped crash
From the RoundTable blog
John Wood touched the moon. Now he's a painter. Go figure.
The Roanoke-born scientist graduated from Virginia Tech with a degree in geology in 1954. After earning a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he went to work for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. There he devoted his career to studying meteorites and moon rocks.
Yet it wasn't his scientific accomplishments that brought him back to Blacksburg last week. He visited campus on Wednesday for the official opening of a show of his paintings in the Holtzman Alumni Center.
The second-floor balcony of the alumni center provides gallery space that each semester hosts the work of a different artist, more than a half dozen since the building opened a few years ago.
"We really want to use the alumni center to display alumni achievement in art, in literature and in the museum," said Tom Tillar, vice president for alumni relations.
The gallery is above an alumni museum and surrounds a library that contains publications by alumni.
It's a wonderful use for the space, showcasing the work of graduates who might not garner the same press as, say, football players with a penchant for killing dogs. It celebrates creation and accomplishment.
The gallery space is open to the public. It's not just art to brighten the day of alumni office staff and special guests. Anyone -- students, faculty and visitors -- can check out the artwork, and many do, department officials say.
This fall, those visitors will see Wood's oil on canvas paintings that evoke senses of place and moments in time.
Your thoughts
Wood was particularly excited to have his work selected.
"It pleases me to no end," he said. "Everyone has been so supportive."
Would-be visitors should be pleased, too. It isn't every day they have a chance to see the work of someone who shatters the myth that art and science are divergent fields without intersection. Throughout his career, Wood says, he dabbled in art. It just took retirement to give him enough time to devote to painting.
Scientists like Wood have been producing great art for centuries. Andreas Vesalius crafted beautifully detailed anatomical drawings in the 16th century. John James Audubon famously rendered birds in the 19th.
Though Wood's subjects might be less scientific in content than those of some of his predecessors, his approach is equally analytic.
"If you look at these paintings, they are very left brain," he said. "They are very planned and layered and calculated."
His work intentionally stands in contrast to much modern art. Whereas abstraction and artistic technique for its own sake have dominated the last century, Wood revels in the content of the image.
"I'm pursuing a rather unpopular philosophy," he explains. "I like recalling scenes that I have seen and recreating them for other people."
His work returns to a period in this history of painting when what was shown was as important as how.
The alumni gallery is the sort of little-known, unexpected locus of expression essential to creating a town steeped in the arts. Theaters and galleries on Main Street, of course, form the foundation, but when lively displays appear in surprising places, then a town knows it is getting something right.
Trejbal is an editorial writer for The Roanoke Times based in the New River Valley bureau in Christiansburg.
