About

“My art occurs at the juncture between Nature and Culture.”

“The rainbow is a very deep memory for humans. It has been coded into our genetic material over millions of years. Seeing a rainbow restores our connection to Nature – it restores our physical and psychic functions.”

Jonas Salk, M.D., Inventor of the first Polio Vaccine – in a conversation with Peter Erskine

“Someone like Peter Erskine (who combines a sense of art with an understanding of how the world works) must have been responsible for Stonehenge.”

Thomas E. Lovejoy, “the Godfather of Biodiversity”

“I walk into a church in my living room every afternoon and think of you, and say ‘thank you Peter.’  Love and gratitude for sharing the Beauty.” 

Olivia-Newton John, Singer and Song writer

Bringing Mother Nature into a Building

Can you remember a time you saw a living rainbow glowing in the sky? How that first glimpse took your breath away, and brought a burst of joy? Now imagine stepping inside a twenty foot high solar rainbow beam you can actually reach out and touch – with colors so rich, no photo or video could ever hope to capture them.

Erskine Solar Spectrum Environmental Art

As the Earth spins, circling the Sun, huge living rainbows slowly glide through an Erskine natural light installation, gradually changing shape and color with the seasons. The entire space becomes a giant prismatic sundial linking us to the cosmos. The architecture is experienced as a grand unified gesture, quietly resonating with the serene beauty of celestial light. We feel whole, serene, peaceful.

Solar Powered Sustainable Art

Peter Erskine’s Solar Spectrum Environmental Art is based on three big ideas:  1. Sunlight is energy.  2. All life is solar powered.  3. Everything is connected to everything else.  In Erskine’s art, our Sun is not only the subject matter of the work, but the medium and energy source as well.

Making History

In 1990 Erskine invented a new Solar Spectrum Environmental Art medium he named Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations (S.O.S.). More than something to be looked at, S.O.S. is a immersive participatory experience. It is Erskine’s meditation on the beauty and dangers of human interaction with Solar radiation: The beauty of the rainbow, and the horrors of global warming, ozone depletion and mass species extinction. Secrets of the Sun uses the emotional impact of art to address the full range of Nature from its most elemental expression as pure light to its most complex expression as global ecology.

In 1992, Secrets of the Sun: Rome premiered at Trajan’s Markets, a two thousand year old architectural jewel in the ancient Roman Forum. Viewer/participants arrived at the provocative ancient site, donned a white jump suit, signed a “legal” damage waiver, then followed a ritual path into darkened rooms, where they actually stepped inside huge beams of natural solar spectrum color. Their white jump suits became living canvases, as millions of gradually changing colors flowed across their bodies, mixing and creating colored shadows on the ancient walls, marble carvings and other visitors.  And the entire ritual experience, including text and spoken word, was infused with a subtle, real-time, ambient sound installation created by sound artists Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger.  They transformed Rome’s fossil fueled traffic noise into – serene musical harmony. Odland and Auinger’s pioneering work with Erskine in Rome created the deep inter-connectedness of Secrets of the Sun.

After experiencing the Rome installation, art historian and critic John R. Clarke wrote, “Erskine has developed a project that is more holistic than any site-specific installation… more thought-provoking than any conceptual piece… and visually more enthralling than any painting, sculpture, or light-installation work in the past two decades.”

A New Kind of Public Art

In 1993, Secrets of the Sun: Millennial Meditations traveled to Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt and in 1995 to Los Angeles’ historic Union Station. From the beginning, Erskine’s solar spectrum public art received extraordinary coverage in the global media, including seven magazine cover stories in four languages, over 100 press articles, and six global satellite broadcasts. TV and radio stories featuring Erskine’s Solar environmental art have been broadcast in over 150 countries. By the time the three year Secrets of the Sun tour ended in 1995, Erskine was recognized as an international artist of light. Since then, he has leveraged what Dr. Salk might call “our genetic love of the rainbow” to create a new medium of serene and healing public art for hospitals, railways, libraries, ancient Roman sites, museums, police and fire stations, commercial buildings, environmental centers – and homes – in Europe and North America.

Sustainable Art for the Coming Solar Age

Each of Erskine’s light art installations grows organically from the Solar, cultural and architectural context of its Place. All of Erskine’s site specific environmental art installations are powered by hundreds, or even thousands of watts of renewable solar energy. S.O.S. Rome employed a 10′ x 10′  heliostat solar tracking mirror that reflected up to 8,000 watts of Sunlight into darkened rooms of the ancient Roman Forum. Solar photo voltaic panels provided all of the electricity for the sound, the motorized laser-cut prisms, and the solar tracking technologies of these “green” art installations. And in 2000, the seventy two, roof mounted laser-cut prisms of Erskine’s solar spectrum installation, CROMOS, in Milan Italy’s Central Railway Station, refracted up to 90,000 watts of solar spectrum light onto platforms and trains, creating moving rainbow beams 80 feet long and 150 feet wide. Quite possibly the world’s largest indoor solar spectrum beams. Experiencing an Erskine Solar light art installation is like walking into our Solar Future – today.

Origins

After Erskine graduated from Yale in 1963 with a bachelors degree in Political Science, he traveled to India on a Fulbright Fellowship. Fresh from completing two Yale Graduate School studio art courses his senior year, he became enthralled with the play of light on the sensual relief surfaces of classical Indian temple sculpture. That formal vocabulary continues to influence Erskine’s work today. In the 1960’s and ’70’s his wood and fiberglass sculptures were shown in American galleries and museums, including New York’s Whitney Museum Sculpture Biennials. Later in the 1970’s, Erskine’s work moved from sculpture in the round, to subtle low relief, monochrome fiberglass wall panels, and works incorporating 23 karat gold leaf. Throughout the 1980’s, Erskine focused on Light and Space installations illuminated by combining Solar and electric light.  Then everything changed. He saw a giant solar spectrum beam on the wall of the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco – and knew he would teach himself how to make art out of refracted Sunlight.

Admiring  James Turrell and Olafur Ellison

Erskine greatly admires Light and Space artist James Turrell, creator of nature paced SkySpaces, artworks that enable viewers to slow down and experience the celestial pace of life right here, down on the ground of planet Earth. Olafur Eliason’s, installations also inspire Erskine. He finds Olafur’s works – employing elemental materials like light, water, earth/soil, and air temperature – dramatically expand our experiential boundaries of Nature and Culture.

Rainbows to Nature

“In the beginning of my Solar Spectrum installations of the eighties, I could only figure out how to paint with Nature in the darkened spaces of my studio, or in a darkened museum gallery.  Since then, I’ve evolved ways to work with Sunlight in the broader, built environment. Now my canvas stretches to the bright interior spaces of hospitals, libraries and railway stations – and even to gardens and parks.

Now my art meets the Sun’s – in Nature.”
~ Peter Erskine