Douglas Leonard Czor
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 1947, Czor was an artist from the beginning. At three-years-old, his favorite toy was modeling clay. He sold his first sculpture, a ceramic bust, at the age of sixteen. His first love was Art, but a strong interest in Science delivered him into a Geology career. Many of his relatives living in the 1800s were artists; they were painters, a cinematographer, decorative iron workers, and even a furrier in St. Petersburg for the Czar of Russia. Upon arrival in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Czor transitioned from a Geological Scientist to full-time Artist in 1985.
Czor loved to combine the creativity of both Art and Science. Czor achieved his first public art commission in 1991 with two electroformed copper bas-relief panels for the City of Hobbs, New Mexico. He was commissioned in 1997 by the Air Force at Kirkland AFB, Albuquerque, New Mexico, to do a wall-hung sculpture titled, “M-100 Spiral Galaxy in Virgo”; it was formed from
diffraction grating film adhered to hammered aluminum panels, and painted with a reverse image technique. Czor chose the M-100 Spiral Galaxy because it was the first celestial object that the Hubble Space Telescope focused on to test its repair by an Air Force Shuttle mission. Czor wrote in his notebook, “When I sculpt with materials from the Space Age, I somehow feel closer to the mysteries of the universe, and that very large scale of events.”
In 2001, Czor was commissioned by Bernalillo County (Albuquerque) to create an edition of two, 6-foot diameter bronze bas-reliefs, and one painted epoxy relief of the county seal. The bas-reliefs are center pieces for the lobby of the new county courthouse, the lobby of the new county jail, and the reception lobby for the main county offices downtown.
If you were looking for Czor during the Fall of 2003, you would have found him in Roswell, New Mexico; there you could have found him installing his design, “Reaching for the Stars”, two 35-foot, painted steel towers that held a stainless steel sphere up toward the heavens. The sculpture is located on the front grounds of the New Mexico Military Institute. The work was commissioned by the State of New Mexico and has emerged as a center piece for the region.
Remarkably, in 2004, the Bernalillo County Courthouse Art Collection purchased another sculpture from Czor. This additional sculpture, “Galileo’s Library”, is mounted in the contemporary art hall on an upper floor of the courthouse; it is composed of four diffraction grating panels, and addresses the struggle for freedom to express new ideas. The struggle of principles in our society is analogous to Galileo’s freedom campaign for Science while under house confinement. Czor created additional metaphors with the window and mirror to suggest an opening to a spiritual world, or crossover to a parallel universe.
In 2005, Czor created “One Wind” for The Festival of Cranes at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. “One Wind” was commissioned by the “New Mexico Art in Public Places Program”. The original commission was to produce a temporary sculpture for the festival. However, it was later purchased and subsequently found a home on Coronado Road in Corrales, New Mexico. The work is composed of a stacked flagstone pyramid, topped by a painted steel ring with three whooping cranes; it is a memorial to the last whooping cranes to live in New Mexico. This work is also an inquiry, asking humanity to help wildlife survive, even as globalization and climate change continues to deepen around the world.
From 2006 to 2010, Czor continued to experiment with spiritual metaphors that bridge the creative forces between artist and scientist. His works ranged from a Zen meditation center bronze bell, “The New Mexico Peace Bell,” to futuristic contemporary sculptures; these works include “Voice of Earth” and “The Promise”. Due to a neck injury, Czor had to set aside large outdoor sculpture, and reinvent himself. Not one to be restrained for long, he took the more intellectual pathway and re-examined his utilization of light-weight materials and research. He also discovered that his writings, design sketches, notebooks, and website are all a part of the artwork. With renewed inspiration, Czor pursued the mystery of how light reflections from sculptures may also induce the viewer to crossover into emotional experiences of music, language, or spiritual phenomenology.
Czor was now moving toward conceptual art and/or post conceptual art. Czor explained, “The anatomy of the visual system is fascinating, and offers an idea on why art is so mysteriously important to our sense of being. When we look at a significant artwork, our sensory neural network brings the sensation of light in various frequencies, time, and in 3-D form into our brain. It is fascinating that the optic nerve doesn’t just extend into the visual cortex; optic nerve bundles also lead directly to our amygdala, hypothalamus, and other neural structures which affect our state of mind. Studies of biochemical changes in the brain show that after beaming different colors into the eye, remarkable changes occur in the concentration of neurotransmitters and many other brain function chemicals found in the cerebrospinal fluid. Perhaps, this is one reason why art is able to heighten our understanding of the world.”
Presently, Czor is researching and experimenting with diffraction gratings in the field of conceptual art and/or the post conceptual art movement. Czor believes that art can save humanity from the terrible forces of globalization by helping to dissolve cultural barriers, stimulate interest in our young people for science & technology, and give rise to higher forms of creativity. For more on Czor’s beliefs, see his essay, “The Spirit of Humanity”, in the “Articles
” section of his website.