Background: 1976–1988

In 1976, I began to utilize pastry bags to apply paint on constructions, which I then embedded with found objects. Cynthia Carlson, a teacher at the Philadelphia College of Art, shared this technique with me. My idea to completely eliminate the painting support (e.g. the canvas) was influenced, I am sure, by the kinetics of Alexander Calder and the works of Frank Stella.

“Kinetic sculpture had first been conceived by the Constructivists, and their influence is evident in Calder’s earliest mobiles; these were motor-driven and tended toward abstract geometric configurations. It was Calder’s contact with Surrealism that made him realize the poetic possibilities of ‘natural’ rather than fully controlled movement; he borrowed biomorphic shapes from Miró, and began to think of mobiles as similes of organic structures—flowers on flexible stems, foliage quivering in the breeze, marine animals floating in the sea. Such mobiles are infinitely responsive to their environment. Unpredictable and ever changing, they incorporate the fourth dimension as an essential element of their structure. Within their sphere, they are more truly alive than any other man-made thing.”
—H.W. Janson, History of Art [6]

NASA space-flight technology offered the only possibility for me to paint in microgravity. In 1988, I pursued having a creative experiment placed aboard the space shuttle through a “Joint Endeavor Agreement” [7]. My intention at that time was for my drift paintings to evolve in zero-g over many hours, to allow their forms to coalesce while floating and drying in zero-g. In 1989, Roger Chassey of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, provided me with information about the first approved work of art selected as an official “non-scientific payload”: actualized by Lowry Burgess, Boundless Aperture was flown aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1988 [8]. (Later, in the late 1990s, I became aware of the work of others, such as Arthur Woods [9] and Kitsou Dubois [10]. A few days before my flight in April 1998, Dana Friis-Hansen, senior curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, informed me of the work of Niu Bo [11]. The development of space art is richly discussed by Ron Miller in his Leonardo article “The Archaeology of Space Art” [12].)

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