As an Artist, J. D. Sage Has Time on His Side

When geologists look at a hillside, they see a window to the past, for contained in the layers of rock within that hill is a record of geologic events that often span millions of years. Perhaps it's not surprising that Joseph D. Sage, a geologist and civil engineer by training, is fascinated by time and ways to visually represent the connections between the past, present, and future.

Sage, professor emeritus of civil engineering, has taught WPI students for 38 years, with an emphasis on geologic science and engineering. He has also been an artist for much of that time. Two years ago he collected examples of his creative output, along with his ideas and unique perspectives about art, in a book titled MetaForms and MetaNudes etcetera (Sagama Publishing, 2002), a work he calls a labor of love for his children and friends. "I have a tendency to want to explain things," he says.

Much of the book is devoted to explaining the evolution of Sage's unique approach to art, which merges aesthetics and mathematics. Sage's artistic journey began in the early 1980s when he first exper- imented with applying mathematical transformations to photographs. Plotting the coordinates on graph paper at first, and later using a slide rule to perform the calculations, he ran photos of his own image through a variety of mathematical shifts to see how his features would change.

Having studied Neolithic and Paleolithic rock paintings at various sites around the world, he was intrigued when he saw that certain mathematical transformations resulted in primitive forms that were reminiscent of the ways early artists depicted human beings. He also knew from his study of art history that a number of artists, including Renaissance masters such as Albrecht Duerer, have used similar spatial trans- formations to create unusual and intriguing artworks.

Sage's art and the connections it made to ancient rock art led him to begin exploring ways to capture another type of trans-formation: the passage of time. In recent years, he has been creating extraordinary works that compress different points in time into a single instant. It's a style Sage likes to call "Timist," after Cubists who squeezed three-dimensional space into a two-dimensional plane.

One example of Sage's timist works is Time Travel, a painting that consists of four panes of glass on which are painted images from three points in time and the equations for time travel. Another, Personal Journey Through an Ancient Burial Ground, was inspired by a visit he made to a cemetery in Greece; accidentally locked inside, he climbed a wall and found himself beside a church. When he entered, he found that a baptism was taking place.

"I had gone from the oldest of ancient Greece to the youngest of modern Greece just by scaling a wall," he says.

Sometimes Sage includes diverse time elements in artwork by using materials and images of varying ages. Homage to Women/Women Time (above) is a large installation that was part of his recent show, "Explorations," at the Worcester Artist Group gallery. The work consists of nine large panels made from dental material in which bones and rocks (some 200 million years old) are imbedded.

Sage says he has always found a strong connection between his pursuits as an artist and the work he has done as an educator and engineer. "There are similarities between art and engineering," he says. "Fundamentally, they're just different ways of exploring the world. That's something I tried to help my students understand. We all have a creative side--that is not limited to artists. There are many avenues and many methods for expressing our creativity."

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Last modified: Sep 13, 2004, 12:09 EDT