Artist orbits Arkansas

John Wooldridge’s travels have shown him the two places he describes as fantastic - Arkansas and Mars.

Mechanical engineer and oil painter Wooldridge, 40, contributed to the design of NASA’s Curiosity rover that landed on the Red Planet last summer.

He worked on the rover’s Surface Analysis at Mars (SAM) gizmo that tests Martian rocks and soil for mineral content. In particular, Wooldridge’s challenge was how to heat the instrument’s 200 inches of “all these little pipes and tubes.”

“It might sound easy,” he says - keeping such delicate mechanisms warm against the deep-dark freeze of the Martian night.

If no, this doesn’t sound as easy as a Martian breeze, then consider the other venture that Wooldridge set for himself. He is out to paint at least one scene from each of 75 counties in his home state.

With something to show for having sketched, painted and photographed scenes in 45 counties so far, the artist is ready for his first one-man exhibit at Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock. “John Wooldridge: Painting Arkansas” opens Friday.

“I love that he is doing this,” gallery co-founder Helen Scott says, describing the Maumelle artist’s style as “lesser realism.”

He paints sometimes impressionistic, yet easily recognizable landscapes and architectural views of familiar sights “all over the state,” she says, adding that she expects “great interest from Arkansans.”

Wooldridge started the spare-time project about three years ago with the “main ground rule” that “each painting had to come from a place that I had personally visited.”

The Buffalo River at Carver. Train depot in Russellville.

Twin-toweredlandmark Old Main at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Post office in Scotland. Tattoo parlor on Seventh Street in Little Rock: Check, check, check, been there, painted that.

Dozens of paintings later, he finds the state has too many sights worth painting to limit the project to his original idea of one county, one canvas. Thirty of Wooldridge’s paintings show scenes he couldn’t resist from just five counties: Searcy, Pulaski, Pope, Newton and Boone.

Boone County is where he grew up, on a cattle ranch near the old mining town of Lead Hill on the shore of Bull Shoals Lake in far north central Arkansas. “Spittin’ distance from Missouri,” Wooldridge says in his artist’s working clothes of jeans and a plaid shirt.

He lived and worked near Washington while contributing to the Mars Rover and other spacecraft. His commute was an hour’s drive to the office.

But for picture-making in some of the more remote parts of Arkansas, “It helps that I can speak a good hillbilly,” Wooldridge says.

“It helps to be one.” PICTURE PERFECT

Time and again, he returns to the imagery he missed when he was away from Arkansas: the hills and ridges, pine trees, lakes and rivers, old buildings, blue skies.

“For me, personally, the most important color in a painting is blue,” Wooldridge says while working in his home studio, lightly brushing in the sky above a river scene.

He is a full-time engineer, designing encoders (means of converting data from one format to another, part of the operating systems of highspeed aircraft). The precision carries over to his artwork, to his choice of blue.

The summer sky is cobalt blue, he says; the winter sky, ultramarine. And there’s Prussian blue, azure, teal, and not a spot of any blue on the beige carpet.

‘There’s always some structure and order in what I’m doing,” Wooldridge says. He might take a looser approach to a canvas than, say, a space satellite, but “I do have a plan.”

“I’m pretty structured in how I go about it,” he says, his brush finding the first blue ripples in the river flowing through the work on the easel.

He applies color atop a sepia underpainting - the picture as it might have looked as an old photograph. Bit by bit, the artist applies more color from a palette that he describes as intentionally limited.

“I like to choose the palettebased on the mood I want to set,” he says. Right now, “I’m trying to figure out what yellow this needs to be,” exactly which of countless yellows is the one that reflects from a ridge along the river.

The sky is cobalt blue. The mood - reflective.

PASTORAL IMAGE

Through his childhood in Arkansas, “I loved the land,” Wooldridge says. “I loved being able to walk through it.But cattle? - no.”

Unable to picture himself in the hard, dirty lot of a cowpoke, Wooldridge studied mechanical engineering at the UA. His bachelor’s degree launched him to a career of design work for companies under contract to NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He and wife Laura moved east for the opportunity.

But one day, the commute seemed as long as a trip to the moon, and worse: Hesaw in his family the signs of too much time in the wrong place.

“When I detected an accent that was not Southern,” Wooldridge says, “I thought, ‘It’s time to go home.’”

He had painted since his teen years, taking art lessons in Harrison. But the interest, if not the skills, had left him. Nothing he painted seemed worth showing.

A change of jobs brought him back to Arkansas in 2007. Aside from design work, hetried painting again.

This time, “the subject meant something to me,” Wooldridge says. “Suddenly, it clicked. I was proud of the stuff I did, and I was proud for people to see it.”

Starting with scenes he knew, he began looking around the state for different ideas. Eight counties into his travels, he imagined painting all of Arkansas.

“What a good way this is to get a lot of work done,” Wooldridge says, “seeing the state I love - again. And I get to see all these places I wouldn’t seek out for any other reason.” EASEL RIDER

The artist plans his car trips along Google-searched routes that line up picturesque sites: “I’ll say, ‘Here’s a little town, let’s see what’s there.’

“And there’s always something interesting along the way or back.”

Some paintings he does en plein air, French for painting outdoors in the classic way of the old masters. He also takes advantage of a tool they didn’t have, a camera, for pictures that allow him to finish a scene at home.

“I’m not the fastest painter in the world,” Wooldridge says, setting his production goal at 20 canvases a year.

His last trip focused on the Arkansas Delta. Expecting to paint “a lot of sky,” he found in the flat land “a surprising quality of subject material. I’d be driving along thinking, ‘Oh, look at that! Look at that!’ … Old buildings, stores, little diners, great stuff.”

Getting the Cantrell Gallery show together used all the reference material he gathered through miles and miles of research - photos and sketchesmade on the spot.

But save a wall for 30 more counties, those yet to be painted.

“I’m planning a trip to the southwest corner,” Wooldridge says. Sevier County, Hempstead, Miller, Columbia, “I’d like to get six or eight of these counties down there.”

He has the paint.

“I need a road trip.” The opening night reception for the John Wooldridge exhibit “Painting Arkansas” will be 6 to 8 p.m. Friday at Cantrell Gallery, 8206 Cantrell Road, Little Rock. The show continues through Aug. 17. More information is available at cantrellgallery.com, or by calling (501) 224-1335.