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N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 5
I S S U E
Contributors
From nerd to cool in just over a decade
Bill Evitts, A&S '64, '71 (PhD), grew up in Northern
Virginia, but he regards Baltimore as "the mothership." And
why not? Evitts, author of
"Ruminations," has been a Johns Hopkins undergraduate
and graduate student, the parent of a Hopkins student, and
the university's former director of alumni relations. After
a decade of living in Buffalo, New York, he has now
returned to Baltimore and is a Hopkins neighbor — and
he's amazed at the change in the area since he's been gone.
"When I first came to Hopkins, it was earnest and decidedly
unfashionable," he says. "There were a lot of engineers
with slide rules on their belts. Now it's actually cool." A
historian, Evitts is the author of three books and is a
contributing editor to Baltimore's Urbanite
magazine.
Out of this world
Dan Durda is a planetary scientist at Southwest Research
Institute in Boulder, Colorado. He's also a space artist.
Durda, whose illustration of Pluto graces our cover, says
art and science really aren't as different as people may
think. "To me, they're both very creative," he says. Durda,
who started painting in 1995 and is a fellow of the
International Association of Astronomical Artists, says
that while some of his paintings are pure "space fantasy,"
many illustrate his fellow scientists' findings. Durda's
artwork has been displayed in several galleries and
exhibitions and has appeared in Sky & Telescope,
Astronomy, The Planetary Report, Final Frontier, and in
the book Everybody's Comet.
Inspired by throwaways
David Plunkert likes rusty metal. And ancient magazines,
old photographs, and crumbling catalogs. These objects
litter his downtown Baltimore studio and serve as
inspiration to the conceptual illustrator, who draws on
people and machines as a recurring theme in his work.
Plunkert's illustration for "The
Other Side of Civility" shows a man having his buttons
pushed. What pushes Plunkert's buttons? "If a client
supplies me with an idea and I sketch it and they don't
like it," he says, laughing. "It's a very rare instance."
Plunkert's work has appeared in such magazines as The
New Yorker, Newsweek, and Rolling Stone. —
Maria Blackburn
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