Pete Hubbard's Art

I started out in art school and then got into engineering. I’m now a civil engineering draftsman/designer. I work on a computer using AutoCAD. But I was making art for a good 10 years before engineering ever occurred to me.

I have borrowed some ideas from engineering for use in my art. In drafting there are a lot of uses of symbols to help convey the meaning of the drawing. For instance north arrows, scale bars, section symbols. Sometimes color is used in a drawing to bring attention to various features in a drawing. In addition to the drawing itself there is a symbols list or legend, an abbreviation list, and so on.

This whole notion of annotating a drawing with symbolism I thought was an interesting graphic device. On my web site under "Use of Borders", in my paintings you will see a boarder. This isn’t a simple frame. This is a functioning graphic symbol used to convey information about the painting. There is a checkerboard kind of demarcation highlighted with colors. The demarcations relate to the grid used in the composition of the painting. The colors are those used in the painting. It’s sort of like a color bar code symbolizing the painting.

These ideas are covered in more detail on my web site. Look in Theory.