Dr. Samuel Peralta founded the Lunar Codex, archiving the works of over 30,000 artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers from 156 countries on the Moon, in tandem with NASA’s Artemis program. He is an award-winning physicist, a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, a Grandes Figuras awarded composer and lyricist, and a producer of Golden Globe-nominated and Emmy-winning films. He has curated exhibits with PoetsArtists, 33 Contemporary Gallery, the Zhou B Art Center, and the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art. He and his wife are named sponsors of the permanent Yayoi Kusama room at the Art Gallery of Ontario. And he cooks a killer penne alla boscaiola.

Q&A

What made you want to start collecting art?

My parents were both visual artists; and while my father gravitated to writing plays, my mother continues painting and sculpting to this day. Growing up, my brothers and I were surrounded by art, not only by works created by our mother and father, but also paintings, drawings, and prints of other artists that they were close friends with.

*Oil and acrylic, terracotta and metal, works by Rosario B. Peralta (Photo credit: R. Go)*

My parents were artists who evolved into being collectors, and a similar evolution happened with me. I wasn’t a visual artist – at the time I wrote mainly poetry and essays – but that love of art they instilled in me manifested itself in my collecting one piece, then another, and then a few more. Later, I found my love of art reflected in my lifelong partner, and that mutual love evolved into a shared passion for collecting.

What was the first artwork which you purchased?

A piece by the Philippine artist Mauro Santos, known professionally as ‘Malang’. I was just beginning university studies, and I saw his work at one of the regular art exhibitions I went to with my parents, an outing as usual for our family as going to the movies. I’d won a scholarship to university that included a personal allowance, and if I remember right, I spent most of my first-year allowance on that watercolor, a realist work that verged on the abstract, called “Coming Storm.” I was hooked.

Coming Storm (1978) Mauro ‘Malang’ Santos

Are you more interested in emerging or renowned artists?

It’s a balance of both. It’s always a thrill to have the chance to collect the work of an artist that’s generally known and admired. After all, they are part of the reason I appreciate the art I do now.

*Seated Woman III Dark Room (1974) Henry Moore*

On the other hand, there is the thrill of collecting artists that you feel should be perhaps more universally well known than they are. And when you hang the works of these emerging artists on the wall, alongside the work of acknowledged masters, or talk about these works in the same breath, comparing themes and technique, concepts and color palettes, it’s almost as if you make it so.

Who is an artist you let get away and now are unable to collect?

In the mid-80s I was in the United Kingdom as a graduate student working on my doctorate in physics. I fell in love with the works of David Hockney. At the time was experimenting with what he saw as a new type of printing machine – in reality, a friend’s photocopying machine.

The ‘home-made prints’ he produced disrupted the color printmaking process and were – relatively speaking – affordable. As a student on a grant, I decided that saving for a trip to Italy with friends and for regular (expensive!) phone calls home was more practical than what were essentially photocopies. Oh, what a missed opportunity!

Have you sold any of your works at auction?

Auctions are essentially theatrical, and so we enjoy viewing and attending these. While we’ve purchased from auctions, we haven’t sold anything yet – but we are readying some works for auction in the future. Among these earmarked for auctions are two lithographs by a Canadian master, Alex Colville. One, “Berlin Bus,” we acquired at a German auction and repatriated; and the other, “Target Shooting,” at a Canadian liquidation auction. We love these works, but they are duplicates of works we already have, and it will soon be time for someone else to enjoy them.

What current trends are you following and why?

Ai Weiwei is opening a new show at London’s Design Museum. It includes a piece called “Water Lilies #1” – a massive, 50-foot-wide piece based on Claude Monet’s water lilies, re-created with 650,000 Lego bricks. It’s not his first piece in what’s been called the “industrial language” of Lego bricks. In the late 2000s, he began using Lego bricks to create portraits of political prisoners and exiles, collected in a 2014 exhibition.

Water Lilies #1 (2023) Ai Weiwei. (Photo credit: Ela Bialkowska/OKNO studio)

He isn’t the only one using Lego bricks instead of brushstrokes or traditional mosaic pieces to create masterworks – in effect, rendering realist work using a modernist idiom. An increasing number of artists are exploring this pathway to realist art, and it will be interesting to see how far they push this concept.

Have you ever been disappointed by an artist?

Yes – myself. I’ve always wanted to be a visual artist, but a few years ago I decided I was perhaps better off as a poet and author. I’ve experimented with abstract works in the style of Piet Mondrian. In one of these fevered states, I purchased a large, flipboard-presentation-style pad of graph paper and on one sheet began coloring in the squares with Mondrian colors – red, green, blue, yellow, white – with each color determined by the roll of a pair of dice. It was an intense undertaking, meditative and even spiritual at times. I was pleased with the result, presenting it to my parents as a gift.

I did a few other pieces in this manner, but a couple of years later, I looked at that original RGBY piece again and a feeling of massive disappointment overcame me – so much so that I’ve never again tried my hand at visual art since then.

Until now.