PAC World magazine is introducing the art of Prof. James Thorp.

It is amazing how little we know about the hobbies of our colleagues and how we find out about them. When I visited Stan Horowitz for his Guru interview, I noticed on the wall in his apartment a large painting that looked like a Jackson Pollock. Knowing how expensive they are, I asked Stan about it. He smiled and told me that it was actually a painting by Prof. James Thorp - another guru in our industry. At the next IEEE Power Systems Relaying Committee meeting I asked Jim if he would be interested to share with us his interest in art and how he started painting in this style.

Prof. James Thorp: I was always interested in art. I won a scholarship to an art institute in grade school and took some art courses as an undergraduate at Cornell, New York.

We had a box of little paintings like the vocabulary cards in a language class with the entire Italian renaissance from Cimabue to Michelangelo.

Half of the tests were a sequence of photos of paintings that lasted about a minute. For each of them you had to say who painted it, when, and where it was. The other half was an essay question.

I took figure classes at Cornell and tried my hand at charcoal and oil. All that remains of that period is the self- portrait. You will have to accept my claim that I looked more like the painting then than now. I did a few graphics while on leave in New York at AEP (American Electric Power). My cousin was an artist and lived in a loft near the World Trade Center. Some of her friends were into graphics. Other than an occasional hand drawn Christmas card, I sort of let the oil paints dry up and spent most of my time working for a number of years. If I had a hobby it was golf.

When I became Department Head at Cornell my Assistant Department Head was named Pollock. We cooked up the idea that I would make a fake Jackson Pollock, he would sign it, and we would hang it in the undergraduate student office and pretend we were so rich we had an original Pollock.

I really enjoyed doing the painting and we had a lot of fun with the incredulous students. Before I knew it, I was creating similar painting to match someone's rug or bedroom furniture, etc. Friends would see one in my home and ask for one. Stan Horowitz has one, as does Arun Phadke (we traded paintings - he is a real painter). Jaime DeLa- Ree has two and is responsible for the idea of painting on glass. I have since learned Jackson Pollock painted on glass.

My Dean, two Assistant Deans, and a department head acquired the paintings after the movie about the Franklin award showed one of each of our paintings. The producer got a kick out of our both being painters but in drastically different styles. The Dean auctioned off one of my paintings to raise money for a $100 million building. I told him I could not paint fast enough to help.

Prof Thorp paints on the pool table in his family room in Blacksburg, one color at a time. He has to keep the composition alive in his mind until its completion.

Fractal Art is a genre concerned with fractals-shapes or sets characterized by self affinity (small portions of the image resemble the overall shape) and an infinite amount of detail, at all scales. Fractals are typically created on a digital computer, using an iterative numerical process. Lately, images that are not technically fractals, but that share the same basic generating technique and environment, have been welcomed into the FA world.

The Fractal Art Manifesto (by Kerry Mitchell) www.fractalus.com/info/manifesto.htm