A California native, Russell Crotty (America, 1956-present) is famous for his globe drawings—eccentric, breath-taking hybrids between drawing and sculpture that are unlike anything anyone has ever done before. An amateur astronomer who has previously completed commissions for NASA, these works were born from his memories of going to the planetarium. But Crotty turns the planetarium inside out, and instead of only seeing half of the sky like the inside of a bowl, you see the entire sphere. A passionate environmentalist, in recent years, Crotty’s globes have shifted from views of the night sky, to more land and seascapes that reflect his growing concern about losing these beautiful vistas.
Around the Vast Blue was commissioned by the Nevada Museum of Art for their Lake Tahoe exhibition in 2015; the first major historical art survey of Lake Tahoe by any institution. To create this work, Crotty sat in a boat in the center of Lake Tahoe and sketched preparatory drawings of the 365- degree view around him—similar to the coastal profiles used in exploration art. He then made preliminary spheres to test the horizon line of the Tahoe Basin and its major features before completing thousands of hours of drawing on this five-foot diameter paper-covered sphere; one of the largest he’s ever made. Crotty further imbues his globe with a sense of the intrepid explorer spirit by creating much of the topography penciling in quotes from Mark Twain’s account of Lake Tahoe in Roughing It.
This is a work about the beauty of the natural landscape and an inner search. There’s a meditative quality to it—both tangible, in the process and time it took to make this globe, and more abstract, considering the meditative process of creation itself. Celestial, serene, and somehow otherworldly, there is the sense of leaving our world and looking at something bigger—opening up our minds to greater possibilities and becoming explorers ourselves.