| Glenn Seaborg |
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Bruce Murray
acrylic on canvas
71" x 58"
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i “worked for” bruce murray
for five years without ever having met him an old pal at kodak used to rhapsodize about the day his company might be run not by another businessman but by an actual photographer it was a lovely if unlikely sentiment in the mba era in 1982 a general became the director of the jet propulsion laboratory but for six extraordinary years before that the reins of planet earth’s premier and virtually only institution dedicated to the robotic exploration of the solar system were held by one of the preeminent planetary geologists of our age bruce murray was the director of jpl for the viking mars landings the voyager flybys of jupiter, saturn and beyond for four decades now a professor of planetary science at the california institute of technology (the #1 university in america according to u.s. news) he has focused on mars while keeping an eye on the rest of the solar system |
a geologist by training he prefers surfaces to atmospheres because there’s always more to resolve in 1980 he and carl sagan co-founded the planetary society he serves as its president to this day after jpl he established links between caltech and soviet space institutions i was amazed to discover that he finds kinship between my magnadott paintings and his images of the surface of mars both rely on a visual context both manipulate resolution and its absence he finds a really close image of mars useless without a wider context 4:1 if he can get it after 10:1 the image is so decontextualized as to have no meaning no way to know if you’re looking at a region near the martian pole or the mojave desert of voyager’s encounter with jupiter he said we have sent human ganglion across the solar system today the human neuron is a half-billion miles long |
| Planetary Geologist |
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25 September 99
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