DON PAGLIA

About

Los Angeles native don paglia is currently Emeritus Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the UCLA School of Medicine.  He served as Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Sub-Saharan Africa and continues to conduct research on medical problems threatening rhinoceroses and other exotic wildlife.

Initially a self-taught artist, he received formal training in multiple media under the singular influences of UCLA’s Joe Blaustein and Jan Stussy.  He was appointed to the NASA Art Program to document the 1983-84 mission of space shuttle Columbia. His paintings, drawings and sculptures have been exhibited regionally and nationally and have received eleven Best-of-Show awards. They have been included in exhibitions at the Smithsonian and Los Angeles Air & Space Museums, Kennedy Space Center, L.A. County Museum of Art, UCLA, Cal Tech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Art Institute of Southern California, Mendocino Art Center and others.

He is the past president of the Physicians Art Society and has won international competitions to design the American Society of Hematology logo and the cover of the journal “Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine”. 

He has also designed logos for components of the UCLA School of Medicine and the Aerospace Historical Society among others, as well as postal caches and commemorative stamp cancellations for the U.S. Postal Service.

Artist Statement

“GROUNDED”

My lifelong captivation with the concept of flight has been reflected metaphorically in my artistic iconography and literally in sculpture and paintings for the Aerospace Historical Society and NASA Art Program.   

Few have captured the rapture of flying better than John Gillespie Magee’s poem “High Flight”:  “…I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings….”  My singular opportunity to follow Magee “…where never lark nor even eagle flew…” ended in 1967 when NASA’s Apollo Applications Program was abruptly truncated by the Apollo-1 tragedy, GROUNDING most its Scientist-Astronaut candidates.

My current series of avian forms fashioned from sedimentary earth (ground) reflects a phoenix-like resurrection of that persistent, if improbable dream.  Remnants of the Northridge Earthquake and residua of repair included an abundance of African-multicolor slate shards, many of which resembled wings or feathers despite their obvious, stony contradictions.  The resultant configurations virtually assembled themselves.  None was cut or modified for conformation, consistent with a goal common to both Art and Science:  to explore that ineffable interface between known and unknown…between random chaos and disciplined order…between entropy and enlightenment.