About

Born in Boston City Hospital to first generation Greek American parents of the Greek Orthodox faith.   The family moved from a duplex house in Cambridge, Massachusetts to the town of Ashland about 25 miles to the southwest of Boston.

Peter is the younger of two children.  His father, a carpenter by trade, also was an avid art and antique collector, later migrating his profession to antique dealer.   Mother, a professional painter, and graduate of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and much later Framingham Teacher’s College.  She painted portraits, worked as a technical illustrator in industry, and taught art at a local high school in the Framingham area.   Peter was often in tow with his father as they visited art museums, galleries, and private collections throughout Boston.  While he learnt techniques of drawing and painting from his mother in the use of media, surfaces, chemicals, and materials from her lifetime of experience.  Also, by observing his mother’s techniques in pencil, crayon, pastel, watercolors, oils, charcoal, acrylics, and the use of brush and knife, in the transformation of objects of three dimensions onto surfaces; and in the use of light, shadow, and perspective of form.

While in his youth, Peter gravitated towards his love of observing nature and the natural world around him in his then, rural-suburban setting of Ashland.   He displayed a talent for representing the natural world on paper.   His exposure to art at an early age trained him in easily visualizing two dimensional representations of three or more dimensions, rotating surfaces in his mind’s eye, translating space groups, and other kinds of visualizations useful in mathematics, and physics.  

Naturally, he developed a love of crystallography and mineralogy which as a requisite depends on that skill.  How prophetic of his research advisor’s comment to him: “When an engineer becomes truly a master of his discipline, his work becomes an art.” 

Peter graduated from Marian High School.   While there he took a wide range of Saturday classes at MIT that were open to high school students.   He graduated from Worcester Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. in interdisciplinary chemistry (geochemistry emphasis), and material science.   Following that he attended graduate school at Boston College studying geology on a teaching fellowship before taking a job working in geophysical data processing for a division of Raytheon, Seismograph Service Corporation (SSC).   It was from there he and his bride, a Waltham native, moved to Pittsburgh and he worked as an exploration geologist for the next 43 years in the oil and gas industry.    He earned his M.S. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh.   That year he was accepted into the doctoral program of that school’s electrical engineering department but with the birth of this first child those plans were put on hold and never realized.  

His early time working in oil and gas exploration required posting well data as points on a map, then contouring visualized surfaces.   In other words, visual skills he learnt from his youth.  A contour map should tell a story and convey an idea just as an art painting should convey a feeling, and those visual messages must be done in a way that captures the attention of the audience such that it is pleasing or non-offensive to the eye.   Perhaps it is not enough to be a knowledgeable geologist to sell an idea to investors.   One must also present that knowledge in a way that the human eye will accept those ideas as being plausible.   So too, the artist must present emotions as being genuine, real, and honest.   The first impression of the audience will mirror the honesty of the painter in his conveyance of his first impressions.   That is why art is so unique to our species.   I wonder if an alien from another world would be equipped to understand human art and so too, would we be equipped to understand his?    I have been drawing and painting all my life, but it did not take on the obsessive urgency that now has prior to Y2K.   Painting is a daily task as is my continued geologic prospecting.   I need to be painting to allow my mind the time to formulate ideas.   Both are highly creative processes, and both are highly technical too – each in their own way puzzles in search of solutions.