"After physicists first demonstrated the optical laser in May 1960, scientists and engineers started thinking of what they could do with it. So did artists."   (For complete article by Patrick McCray click here.)

"Another notable effort was by Rockne Krebs, an American artist who made laser-based sculptures for several years starting in the late 1960's." 

"Over time, Krebs expanded his focus from small-scale efforts using lasers in rooms and galleries to ambitious outdoor installations that incorporated building and landscapes into the work. Harking back – unconsciously, most likely – to Garmire’s experiments, his piece The Green Hypotenuse (1983) used a 7 mile-long laser beam that stretched from the observatory on Mt. Wilson down to Caltech."

"A key difference between Garmire’s “lasergrams” and installations made by artists like Krebs is the latter’s ephemeral nature. When the laser was turned off, the art disappeared. All that’s left are the sketches that went into its planning – “drawings for sculpture you can walk through” according to the title for one Krebs’ exhibit...." 

 - Patrick McCray

Christmas Lights Kansas City, Missouri, 1956, by Rockne Krebs. 

“I find CITY LIGHTS painted in 1956 by Krebs as a teenager of the Christmas lights in the Plaza in Kansas City, prophetic of the homages to the urban landscape that he would create a decade and a half later and would describe in a 1972 essay titled Light Is The City At Night.  In the interim Krebs would pursue the rather typical course of the serious student artist, majoring in sculpture at the University of Kansas with the sculptors Elden Tefft, Bernard Frazier, Jim Bass and James Sterrit.  The fact of his long artistic apprenticeship has been over looked because he appeared to most art world observers to have been born with lasers in the sixties….”   Jay Belloli, 1990