Down in his basement art studio, it's clear that his paintings aren't the only thing abstract about Peter Smolenski.
The large table in the center of his workspace is covered with paints, brushes and canvases filled with his vibrant portraits of intricately detailed mayhem, but on the bench against the wall are a fancy Wacom tablet and a work station. Everywhere else, holograms blink at me as I move around the space—some framed on the walls and other fragments affixed everywhere. A manikin in a skin-tight Smolenski pattern stares at visitors with holographic eyes. As the viewing angle and lighting become aligned just right, large plates of dark glass suddenly take on green holographic depths— impossibly detailed scenes captured in a sheet of flat glass.
Though Peter Smolenski spends many of his days down in his basement studio alone, paintbrush in hand, stooped over his abstract canvases, he's an active collaborator, a familiar face at local art gatherings and concerts, and someone who has, through enthusiastically pursuing his interests on line, cultivated a worldwide network of colleagues. In his basement lair, he's a sorcerer, but above ground, he comes across as Ben Franklin's hipper, younger brother in a well-worn T-shirt.
Recently, after contributing to Ted Mikulski's book Art is Dead, he and artist Mikulski completed a nearly 20-foot-long mural on the former Cahillane Dodge dealership on South Street in Northampton.
"I don't typically want my work to be representational," Smolenski said, "but since it was going to be in such a public space, and it was to be outside the new Mill River Marketplace, we chose a river theme. I see my painting to be the rocks showing through Ted's water." He points out that it is the first abstract mural posted in a public space in Northampton.
Earlier this month, Smolenski held his second online art show, which is still available for viewing at www.petersmolenski.com. It includes a collection of photography, a guitar he customized, a new hologram and recent paintings. It also includes a selection of paintings from his childhood that show a long-time interest and ability with palette and composition.
Many of his adult paintings, including an epic 36-foot-long canvas it took him a year to finish, fill the four corners of the page with colorful shapes and forms, some large, dominant and filled with primary colors, others nearly microscopic, foaming up on the page. Occasionally faces or other recognizable elements appear out of the maelstrom of color and form. Smolenski has no preference for how people view his work or what the "correct" orientation of a piece is. He delights in hearing people's interpretations. Psychedelic whales swimming through plankton. A cross section of someone's mind—not the meat of the brain, but a slice of their imagination.
Long fascinated by holography as an art form, Smolenski has kept in contact with many of those who developed the technology during its heyday decades ago. While holograms are still created for commercial purposes (children's stickers, credit cards and identification cards), the technology is so expensive and rarefied that few artists consider it a feasible medium to dabble in, much less make a career of. A German friend, Matthias Sollner, recently made Smolenski a hologram that included one of his paintings. To add depth, Sollner added a magnifying glass in the foreground, and when you look through it, the details of Smolenski's painting jump out, magnified. Smolenski dreams of restoring holography's rightful place as an art form by collaborating with his expert colleagues and opening a studio with their equipment.
"Holograms aren't photographs," he said. Instead of capturing a flat two-dimensional representation of a space from a single view point, as in photography, holograms don't record images, but encode how light is scattered through a three-dimensional space. This information can be decoded to reconstruct the space in the hologram. In effect, the hologram works as a window looking out on a space, frozen in time. Moving your head side to side, you can see more in the periphery out of that window.
Another feature of holograms that intrigues Smolenski is that if one is broken into pieces, each fragment contains the information for the whole hologram. If you found a piece of a photograph that had been torn up, there would be no way of knowing what the rest of the image looked like, but not so with a hologram. Again, as with a window, putting your eye to a hologram fragment would allow you to see everything outside. Recently, Smolenski has been digging deep into this mind-blowing technology, reading about theories that represent our whole world as a kind of hologram we live in. He's not certain he believes the theory, but it's gotten him to thinking and has resulted in his latest series of works.
"A Brief Glimpse into the Holographic Universe," Smolenski said, "is the overall title for the series, and each painting is a different part. They're each meant to represent certain critical moments in time when you could possibly see the holographic world."
His first piece, "Before the Crash," came out of another collaboration with Mikulski, and is among Smolenski's only paintings with a narrative. A plane descends into flames. In the sky above the plane are three hologram birds, snipped out from credit cards, watching it go down. In the second piece of the series, "Blowing Your Holographic Load," Smolenski goes further with the mixed-media approach, and around a giant member in the midst of orgasm a cloud of holographic snippets explodes.
"I got over three thousand people to come to an art showing that didn't happen anywhere," Smolenski said. "It's an excellent way to have a show. You don't have to pay for framing your pictures—damn! I should have been a fucking frame maker instead of a painter! You don't have to blow all kinds of cash on catering. You can play your own music, and everyone in the world can be there. And a lot of them were."
