Robert John Glass (Jr.) grew up in the Midwest, worked with sea turtles in Georgia and Costa Rica, studied night hawks, beetles and moths, lived on deserted beaches and backpacked the Sierra Nevada. He fell in love with the beauty of natural fluid mechanics while in graduate school at Yale and after his PhD at Cornell University, he came to Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico to conduct research in the geologic sciences, the flow of water and other fluids within the subsurface. Using self-invented quantitative visualization techniques, his experiments illuminated the beauty and science of emergent flow structure within rocks, fractures and soils. In time, he enlarged his view to encompass emergent, self-organized structure (pattern) within general non-equilibrium complex systems (such as human systems) as they ever surround us in this world. Recently he has transitioned from practicing the art of science to the creation of art driven by experimental discovery. This website is his effort at documenting and organizing his new evolving body of work, some images of works will be placeholders to be replaced with better, as will be supporting text, as time permits.

Artist Statement: I am driven to discover and to create. Each creative work is an experiment intent on discovery. It begins with a set of constraints or choices: this idea, these colors with those viscosities, this type of metal and that set of tools and use. My body, intentions, feelings and disposition of the moment engage with the medium: color juxtaposed, mixed by the spread of knife on canvas or flowing of its own accord, metal parted by torch and grinder. The work grows, evolves, elucidating new intentions as the process of discovery unfolds, until forged together, a unique organized voice emerges birthing a self of its own, unknowable but through the act of creation, a melding of mind, body and medium. Each experiment influences the next, paths winding and branching in time as discovery begets discovery.