John D. Wooldridge

Maumelle man values combination of engineering, art

John D. Wooldridge of Maumelle is both analytical and creative. While he is an engineer who has worked on space-industry projects for NASA, Wooldridge is also an artist. His paintings are done in oils and often showcase old buildings, historic bridges, rivers and communities.
John D. Wooldridge of Maumelle is both analytical and creative. While he is an engineer who has worked on space-industry projects for NASA, Wooldridge is also an artist. His paintings are done in oils and often showcase old buildings, historic bridges, rivers and communities.

— John D. Wooldridge of Maumelle may have a résumé unlike any other on the planet — he’s an engineer who has worked on projects for NASA and brings his analytical mindset to the canvas as an award-winning artist.

His paintings, done in oils, are striking images of abandoned buildings, historic bridges and well-known rivers, especially the Buffalo National River, and towns and cities.

“First and foremost, I consider myself a realist because I’m obsessed with value,” he said. Value, the use of light and dark, “defines for your mind the shape and the forms you’re trying to depict.”

Wooldridge’s paintings, except for some early work, don’t use bright colors.

“It just kind of comes out that way. I try not to analyze it too much, but it’s hard not to as an engineer,” he said.

Wooldridge, 39, grew up on a cattle farm on Lead Hill in Boone County, where his father landed after a career in the Navy. While Wooldridge bundled up in the winter and broke ice on the pond, fed the cattle and hauled hay, he envied the city boys who were inside playing video games.

“I wouldn’t change it at all, looking back now,” he said.

He loved the outdoors, and he loved to draw.

When he was barely a teenager, his mother enrolled him in a few art lessons in Harrison, but Wooldridge said he is primarily self-taught.

Wooldridge said he wanted to be a physicist from a young age.

“I wasn’t incredibly strong in math,” he said. In science and “more qualitative things, I was very good at that.”

He dreamed of working in the nuclear field, “making machines, powering the future,” he said. As a child, he was inspired by photos of space travel in National Geographic.

“I kind of viewed space flight as the future for humanity,” he said. “We have finite resources on Earth. If we don’t get off this rock somehow, we’re going to go extinct.”

Although he entered the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville as a physics major, he received a scholarship for mechanical engineering and changed his focus.

His first job was in Fayetteville at a place where he designed cast-aluminum wheels, “kind of a place holder until I found something more interesting,” he said.

Something more interesting came along. He and his wife, Laura, and son Jeff moved to Maryland, and he worked for a company near Washington, D.C., that did contract engineering for the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

Wooldridge said he worked on a couple of noteworthy projects, including Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, one of the instruments on Curiosity, the rover that landed on Mars in August.

Curiosity’s mission was to assess the ability of Mars to support life, past or present, according to the NASA Goddard website.

SAM, which Wooldridge said was the size of a microwave, takes Martian soil samples and bakes them to vaporize molecules and routes them through the instruments — Wooldridge called it “plumbing” — to various detectors to determine what elements make up the soil. Those plumbing lines have to be “very, very hot,” he said, as much as 200 degrees Celsius.

“I helped design the thermal system to help keep those tubes at those temperatures,” he said.

Wooldridge and his family moved to Maumelle in 2007 before the system was in its final form, he said, but he contributed to the work.

“My intelligence helped with something up there. It was very cool, and it was very rewarding,” he said.

Wooldridge said he was commuting to work 55 miles one way, and he and his wife wanted to come back to Arkansas to raise their children.

“We would have been raising kids in an apartment. I wanted him to grow up as close to what I had as practical,” Wooldridge said.

Wooldridge took a job with BEI Precision Systems & Space Co. in Maumelle, which builds optical encoders for spacecraft, military and commercial applications.

He said he enjoys still being involved in the space industry, but it’s not a job for the impatient.

“Aerospace is slow and ponderous. You work on the same thing for months and months at a time. It taxes one’s novelty cells,” he said, laughing.

Before he came back to Arkansas, Wooldridge’s passion for art rekindled after he went to an art fair in Maryland and saw artists working.

“I said, ‘Hey, I used to do this. I still could do this,’” he said.

He compared his desire to a campfire that is still smoldering the next day, “and you kind of kick it around, and it’ll fire back up.”

The first painting he did once he picked up the paintbrush again in 2004 was a scene of a moonlight night over a pond. The painting hangs in the hallway of his home in Maumelle.

Wooldridge’s natural talent has been honed — picking the brains of gracious fellow artists, he said, who share their knowledge. One of those is Stapleton Kearns in New Hampshire. Wooldridge also finds inspiration in Winslow Homer and Frederick Remington.

Wooldridge said he’s “slow in getting there” as a legitimate painter.

“People who have a natural gift at it have a leg up. It takes study. This is the hardest thing I have ever done — not only seeking external legitimacy, but just the act of creating it and learning it,” he said.

“Unlike engineering, and the bridge falls or it doesn’t, there are hundreds of ways to design a painting, from value to line, to shape, to color. You just have to love it to be good at it.”

Beginning this year, his artwork was accepted to Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock.

As a member of the Arkansas League of Artists, Wooldridge had two pieces in a fall show that was held in the gallery, and he sold them both.

He’s been in the Diamond National Juried Exhibition in Hot Springs, and he won an award last year, and he placed third in the Arkansas League of Artists’ spring show.

Wooldridge will have his first solo art show Oct. 7-26 at the Center for Art and Education in Van Buren.

A side project he calls his “geek art” was featured in the Symphony Designer House at The Village at Hendrix.

The project engages more of his engineer mind that encodes messages in geometric patterns using ASCII binary conversion.

“They’re difficult. They take a lot of work,” he said. “It’s almost like penance.”

Wooldridge said he has only painted about seven of those works. He has one leaning against the wall in his upstairs home studio.

It is a circle of rectangle shapes, and each piece is “basically a bit, representing a 1 or 0,” he said. When decoded, it says: Binary Opposition No. 1: “By deconstructing the landscape, I reconstruct it within myself.”

“It’s kind of my hokey self-quote,” he said.

One of his ongoing projects, which he’s been working on for two years, is Painting Arkansas. He is painting a scene from every county in the state, and he’s halfway there. For example, Faulkner County is depicted by “a little feed mill out toward Guy.”

“I need to learn to paint cows, I guess,” he said.

Asked if he is an engineer who’s a painter, or vice versa, he paused several seconds to consider the question. Then he laughed.

“If we go by what pays the bills, I’m an engineer who paints,” he said.

One day, he said, he wants to make a living from art, but for now, he has the best of both worlds.

Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.

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