Sunday, October 1, 2006

Seattle's public art thoughtful, quirky, weird
Residents support creative spirit behind the artwork

By JOHN AND SALLY MACDONALD


Universal Press SyndicatePublished on: 06/04/06




Seattle — Under a bridge not far from downtown, a warty giant troll lies in wait beneath a section of highway. Youngsters explore a one-eyed, Volkswagen Bug-crunching troll crouching beneath a highway overpass in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood.






'Angie's Umbrella' on a Belltown neighborhood street corner near downtown is a testament to Seattle's blustery, rainy climate.









In Peace Park, paper cranes adorn the statue of a Japanese girl who died of radiation poisoning after the bombing of Hiroshima.




A few blocks away is a drawbridge where a neon "Rapunzel" lets down her hair and stares at a group of silent stiffs dressed up in someone's old clothes and trailing "Happy Birthday" balloons in the breeze.

Guidebooks go on and on about Seattle's natural wonders, romantic ferries, that iconic Space Needle, the floating bridges, the wonderfully weird architecture of the Experience Music Project.
Visitors expect to buy coffee in Starbucks' hometown, dodge a damp salmon thrown by the mongers at the Pike Place Market and toss french fries to a sea gull along the waterfront.

But most of the guidebooks don't let on that Seattle boasts some of the most out-of-the-box public art anywhere, works that beg to be checked out just for the grin of it.

The irreverent Fremont neighborhood

Some of Seattle's best tongue-in-cheek creations are ensconced in the Fremont neighborhood just north of downtown, a community so irreverent that its motto is "De Libertas Quirkas," translated as "Freedom to be Peculiar." The neighborhood once persuaded City Hall to designate it the "Center of the Universe."

The luminous "Rapunzel" can be found on the operations tower of a drawbridge connecting Fremont to downtown.

The humongous one-eyed concrete troll crouches in the barren dust beneath the nearby Aurora Bridge, clutching a real Volkswagen Bug in one gnarled paw and glaring contemptuously with his chrome hubcap eye at the kids who come by the carload to explore his stringy hair and enormous nostrils.


And just down the hill is "Waiting for the Interurban," a life-size sculpture that portrays riders waiting for the train that linked Seattle with its suburbs in the city's early days. The tip-off that the work is not all that serious is the human-faced dog (rumor is, the artist's face) peering through the legs of two of the commuters.

Locals can't leave the "Interurban" alone any more than they can the "Troll." Seattleites adorn the figures in old clothes, funny hats and poignant posters to celebrate rites of passage: weddings, birthdays, deaths, election days — even sunny days.

Locals interact with the art

The "Interurban" is not the only piece of Seattle art that locals decorate with regularity. For the past 15 years, people have folded thousands of paper cranes to string and have draped them like leis around the neck of a statue of Sadako Sasaki, a little Japanese girl who survived the Hiroshima bombing of World War II, only to die of radiation sickness at the age of 12. Sadako stands in Peace Park, a minuscule green space at the end of a bridge leading to the University District, home of the University of Washington.

Why this touchy-feely love affair with public art?

Some suggest Seattle's famous soggy weather does odd things to the brain. "We came up here to get out of the rain," said a grinning Rita Mallory, staring up at the "Troll" in its dry home under the freeway one Sunday afternoon. She and her husband, Rick, had driven from the nearby town of Lakewood to see it for the first time.

"It's goofy, but nice," she mused as they waited for a family of Japanese tourists to finish taking photos before snuggling up under the creature's face for a snapshot for their own album. "It makes you laugh despite the weather."

Scientists, tech types spawn art?

One reason Seattle so loves its public art may lie on the flip side of the city's technological identity. In his book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," Richard Florida uses Seattle as one example in drawing a case for connecting a vibrant creative culture to an equally lively — and creative — population of scientists and techno-geeks. Call it the "Bill Gates factor," for the Microsoft guy who grew up here.

But this love affair with whimsy is far from recent. Seattle has been a repository for the weird and oddly wonderful since 1899, when J.E. Standley opened Ye Olde Curiosity Shop on the waterfront to sell curios and American Indian baskets to tourists and supplies to gold prospectors heading north to Alaska and the Yukon. Visitors still flock to the waterfront shop to buy souvenirs and gape at Sylvester and Sylvia, two well-preserved mummies Standley acquired in the days when the West was still considered wild.

Officially, the city has been adding in earnest to its collection of public art since only 1973. That's when it became one of the first cities in the country to set aside 1 percent of any money spent on public projects for art. Soon private businesses also were putting money into fanciful sculptures out front.

As a result, the city is chock-full of art, much with a whimsical bent. Even manhole covers on downtown streets are embossed with themes from history or industry.

The troll under the bridge

A few years ago, Seattleites were asked to vote for their favorite city icon. The "Troll" was beaten only by the Space Needle.

"It was really a simple idea," says Steve Badanes, a University of Washington architecture professor and one of a team of artists responsible for the "Troll." "Fremont wanted something to dress up the area under the bridge, and we all know what lives under bridges: trolls. But the first time I went up there, it looked like places like that all over, with mattresses and needles and so forth, and I thought, 'Man, this place is dark.'"

When the "Troll" was unveiled, a newspaper art critic panned it unmercifully, Badanes says. The critic changed her mind once she saw the love it generated right from the start.

The 1 percent law, the "Troll" and the "Interurban" helped turn Fremont and, by extension, all of Seattle into an artists' magnet.

"We saw the neighborhood as funky and kind of dangerous," Badanes says, "and the 'Troll' fit right in. It's really an anti-development statement. He's crunching a car, for heaven's sake."

It wasn't long before the Soviet revolution hit Fremont. Sort of. A Seattle man, Lewis Carpenter, was teaching in Poprad, Slovakia, in 1989 when the Soviet Union began to implode. A mob had toppled a statue of Vladimir Lenin, the father of Russia's revolution and, as Carpenter later told the story, he couldn't just let it lie there. So he bought it and sent it home.

A home
for Lenin
Today, it graces a busy street corner in Fremont. It's a bronze work depicting Lenin as a full-blown revolutionary, surrounded by stylized guns and flame.

Fremont folks, who are noted for their open-mindedness and their sense of the absurd, love their Lenin. So much so that the statue recently spent weeks sporting a yellow rubber ducky atop its revolutionary head.
Fremont missed getting another whimsical piece for its collection. A giant cowboy hat and boots that once distinguished a gas station in the city's industrial area were moved to a small park nearby and are being refurbished.


"It's one of those kind of roadside giants you find more in the Midwest than out here, and there's fewer and fewer of them anywhere," says Andrew Sheffer, in charge of the parks project.


Locals and tourists make the heart-pounding trek up a grassy mound of earth at Gasworks Park, a few blocks east of Fremont, for a "best view" of downtown and take a turn at telling the time by the bronze-and-brick sundial at its peak. The piece, about 30 feet across, is decorated with salmon and symbols from astronomy rendered in inlays of beach glass, broken pottery and bronze. A plaque tells people where to stand on an oval marked with the months of the year to use their own shadows to tell time. Of course, it has to be sunny to work, which some say reduces its usefulness significantly in Seattle.

Silhouettes in the window

Locals, of course, love some of the city's more obscure pieces. Linda Knudsen McAusland, active in the city's art scene for years, says one of her favorites can be seen in the upper windows of an old electrical substation in the Ballard neighborhood. It consists of silhouettes of hands playing the children's game of rock, paper, scissors. It's best seen at night when the windows are illuminated.

"I like it because it works on so many levels," she says. "It's a kids' game, but it also is all about power and different kinds of power and its relationship to people. You don't have to have a doctorate to understand it." John Turner might say that kind of reaction is what public art is all about. Turner, a University of Washington professor, teaches his students to create works the public can relate to. "We try to transmit the thought that artists are creating a voice for the community," Turner says. And if that means it gets climbed on or dressed up, well, all the better.

Turner has created a piece that hits two of Seattle's hot buttons, a love for the marine wildlife that abounds in Puget Sound and a widespread dream for world peace. Turner contracted with the Navy to recycle 22 diving-plane fins from decommissioned attack submarines built in the 1960s. He planted them in a field overlooking Lake Washington on Seattle's east side, where they look for all the world like the dorsal fins of an orca pod. Turner calls it "The Fin Project: From Swords Into Plowshares." A similar version has been installed in Miami. "Public art is not the same as gallery art," Turner points out. "It's about trying to capture the history of a people, the voice, the desires of a people."

Meanwhile, Seattle just keeps adding to its public collection.

Video in the library

The city's new library downtown, designed by renowned architect Rem Koolhaas, is drawing more than just bookworms and fans of great architecture. Locals and tourists alike head for its escalators, standing shoulder to shoulder, camera to camera, as they glide past three egg-shaped television screens that display oddly captivating faces that blink and mutter soundlessly at passers-by.

Another new piece that's likely to become a beloved icon is "Angie's Umbrella," a giant bumbershoot turned inside out that twists with the breeze on a Belltown neighborhood street corner near downtown.

Of course, not everyone in Seattle is gleefully riding the escalator, dressing up the "Interurban" and climbing on the "Troll." Some folks are saying enough already.

The 1 percent-for-arts program recently took a hit that could cut funding for new projects. A class-action lawsuit contends that any artwork paid for by funds generated by the city's electrical utility should be closely connected to the utility's mission.

And when the Seattle Art Museum unveiled a fountain for a new sculpture park to open this fall near the waterfront, lots of people cried foul. Under the terms of a million-dollar bequest, the fountain had to include a realistic figure of a nude man. The artist, Louise Bourgeois, proposed an unclothed father and son on separate pedestals, reaching for each other through a wall of water that shifts to show one figure at a time. But where some look sentimentally on the work, others are saying it's obscene.

Both brouhahas could put a crimp in the city's freewheeling public art scene. On the other hand, if past actions are an indication, Seattleites and tourists may try to make everyone happy, collecting old clothes to dress up the "obscene" father-son fountain once the park is completed.

Sally Macdonald is a former reporter for the Seattle Times. John Macdonald is the newspaper's retired travel editor.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

Hoquiam's First Annual Art Festival is Right "On Track"! by Nancy Draper


During the weekend of August 26th and 27th, 2006 - I participated as a vendor/artist in the very first “On Track Art Festival”, produced by the city of Hoquiam, in Grays Harbor.


Everything about this event was terrific - - from the planning, communications, cost to participate, and right down to the very enthusiastic and warm welcome each of us received. When I arrived on Saturday morning, I was immediately and warmly greeted by Barbara (one of the committee members), who offered to help me in any way possible.

The event was a joy in which to participate. I could feel the enthusiasm of everyone involved - - from the artists, the city officials, the volunteers, and all of the attendees, who were so happy to have such a great event in Hoquiam, and took the opportunity to thank each of us as they visited our booths. All of the local shop and pub owners thanked us for bringing both our art and our patronage to town.

Throughout the two days, the artists were treated like gold by the festival committee members. I was flabbergasted to attend an artist’s reception at the end of the first day, to find a buffet of food set up for all of us (that’s unheard of, really!)



We were all thanked repeatedly for our participation, and a grand prize was awarded to the artist judged to have the most interesting pieces of work (the grand prize was a weekend at the Quinault Lodge!)

There were artists featuring pottery, jewelry, weaving, photography, painting, woodwork, handmade soaps, teas and clothing.

My overall sales for the weekend were great - - and more than I had anticipated. I hope to be invited back next year, and if so, I will lock in the dates (which again will be the last full weekend of August.)

Mary Brown and her committee and the City of Hoquiam should be very proud of this first-time event. It was a great success, and I am sure that it will only get bigger and better!

Nancy Draper
Tacoma, WA

Saturday, September 2, 2006


Pat Longley, A Pacific NW Artist

Original Encaustic Wax Paintings






Editor's Notes: This wonderful article about Pat Longley and her family originally came out in the King County Journal on September 25, 2004. Pat will be returning to Issaquah Salmon Days on October 7 - 8, 2006.


To see more of Pat's Encaustic Wax Paintings at Lady Nin's Original Encaustic Wax Paintings by Pat Longley

Tragedies help a wife and mother embrace her inner artist
By Mary Swift, Journal Reporter

It was facing death that taught Jeff Longley how to live. It was dealing with tragedy that led his mother to an art medium she'd never tried. And in the end, it is her art that is helping his family heal. At age 26, the future seemed full of possibility for Jeff. Then, he was diagnosed with adrenal cancer and in February of 2000 underwent surgery to remove a large tumor on his adrenal gland. He never saw again. ``He had a stroke during surgery,'' says his sister, Sammamish's Tammy Muller. ``He saw only pitch black from that day forward. ``For six weeks, we expected him to die. God had a different plan. I decided the hospital was no place for him and took him home. He lived with us for four years.'' Muller, who is married and the mother of two children, is an emergency room social worker. When she had to work, her mother, Pat Longley of Burien, took care of Jeff.


Tragedy changed Jeff, the two women say. Unable care for himself, unable to see, unable to drive, and unable to work, he had to give up his house and his brand new car. He lost everything. Everything -- that is -- except a part of himself he may not have known existed. His sight was gone, but Jeff had new vision. ``God took everything and gave him back a different personality,'' Muller says. ``Before he got sick, he was an Eeyore. He didn't really appreciate life. He was obsessive-compulsive. Cereal boxes had to be in an exact order, that kind of thing. After his surgery, it was like night and day. He appreciated life. He had to depend on other people so he learned the value of friendship. He was blind, but he had joy. He touched lives. He appreciated life.'' And that's how tragedy became a kind of gift for Jeff and those who loved him. ``He laughed a lot more,'' his mother says. ``He was jolly. He made jokes. His favorite thing was to ask you to move from in front of the TV. You'd do it without thinking, and then realize he couldn't see it anyway.'' Before his surgery, Jeff had been a better-than-average dart player. Longley was determined not to let her son's blindness get in the way of that passion.

One Christmas, she bought him a dart board. Standing behind him, she'd direct his throws: ``Right. Left. Up. Down.'' And Muller wasn't about to let Jeff sit on the sidelines either. One day, she took him out on a jet ski, then let him drive. He tossed them both in the water. The family still laughs about the incident. Watching Jeff's struggle was difficult enough for his family. Then, in August of that same year, Jeff's father, Ken Longley, was critically burned in a race car accident. He spent 32 days at Harborview before returning home. Pat Longley found herself searching desperately for a creative outlet that would help her deal with her emotions.


In the past, she'd dabbled in oil and acrylic paint, never with much success or satisfaction. One day, cruising the Internet, she spotted information about encaustic painting in which beeswax-based paint is heated and then applied to a surface with irons. ``I found a place in Wales to order supplies and went to work,'' says Longley, who has no formal art training. ``It just clicked. I could go in and paint and just lose myself. One of the things I hated about oils was that I had to wait for them to dry. With wax, it dries instantly.'' To create her paintings, Longley takes small blocks of colored wax, rubs them on one of her assortment of irons -- the largest is the size of a travel iron, the smallest the size of a fountain pen -- then uses the iron to apply the wax to a piece of paper placed on a warm hot plate. Keeping the paper warm allows her to move the wax around using a sponge or a tissue, she says. ``I also use a hair dryer to blow my wax,'' she says. Eventually, she began displaying and selling her work at art shows with the help of Muller, who does most of the matting and framing, and her oldest son, Terry. Sometimes Jeff would go along, at one point joking with his family that he could make more money if they'd just give him a tin can full of pencils. (As it turned out, Longley has sold many of her paintings -- a fact that still amazes her.)

``We needed something besides just coping with sickness in our lives,'' Muller says. ``Her art helped us heal.'' Last year, Longley's work won one of four awards presented during the annual Issaquah Salmon Days celebration. The award was for originality. She'll be back at Issaquah Salmon Days next weekend (Oct. 2 and 3). Jeff, however, won't be there to tease her. He died a year ago this November after being diagnosed with cancer a second time. Longley recalled the day Jeff learned he had cancer the first time. ``He and I and his dad stood there and we all bawled,'' Longley says. ``Then Jeff said, `OK, let's go get fish and chips at Skippers.' The day we found out he had cancer again, we all stood around and bawled again -- and then we went out to Skippers.'' She chuckled, recalling an exchange she and Jeff had during his illness. ``I told him if he died before me he could come back and see me,'' she said. ``He said, `If you go before I do, don't you dare come back and see me' -- and we all laughed.'' Longley says that before he died, Jeff made seven tapes for his loved ones. In them, he reflected on life, death and dying. ``What a tearjerker it was to hear them,'' Longley says. She and Muller plan to write a book about Jeff and his journey. ``What I think Jeff would want to tell people is this: Quit sweating the small stuff -- and tell people you love them,'' she says.

And she says she believes one thing for sure: ``I have a lot of faith, but I'm not super religious. I know there's a god. I can tell you there's a path. And at the end of every bad thing there is something good coming out of it.''

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Art Can Help People Cope


'Art Can Help People Cope'


By Molly Shen






DUVALL - On the anniversary of Sept. 11, families will gather at Ground Zero. Coming together in that spot on that day is part of their healing.

Some of those victims' families will meet teenagers from our area who want to help. They are young enough to be called kids, but old enough to understand sorrow.

"My mom went through cancer when 10," said 16-year-old Sam Matson. "And I, I was quiet. I didn't talk to anyone."

Sam found something to help him cope.

"Art can help people," he says. And not just the artist.

"I hope they feel a sense that someone cares about them," says Rachel Land.

Art can help the person who receives it. So the art students are creating 100 wooden boxes, each hand painted with a child in mind -- a child who lost a loved one in the 9/11 attacks.

They will distribute them at Ground Zero.

Chloe Dziok hopes to meet the person who chooses her box: "I would say 'I hope you like this box. I put a lot into it. I hope when you see it you can realize people still remember what happened. And they still care.' "

Each box contains a gift and a note. The message: that joy can come from sorrow and good can come out of tragedy.

It is a deep sentiment wrapped up in 100 wooden boxes.

"I hope he feels just loved and thought of," says Sam.

The students at the Northwest Art Center in Duvall still have a couple dozen boxes that need to be painted. And they could use money to help them ship the boxes.

If you'd like to help, send an email to annedz@msn.com.

Greg Delaney, Artist and Actor

Greg Delaney

Curtains, a film noir

On Saturday, August 12th, my husband (whom I fondly call Lord Nin) and I ventured out to Capital Hill. After wandering around the wonderful antique shops, we attended a sneak preview of a film noir named Curtains created by Bob Allen, with Greg Delaney as one of the cast members.

Curtains, is a murder mystery set in Seattle in the fall of 1948. The following is a synopsis from Curtain's website: During the final days of World War II, the Allies were finding caves loaded with Nazi loot: art, diamonds and gold bullion worth millions of dollars on the black market. Five GIs - Jerry Allen, George Walker, Stan Goddard, Lewis Riley, and Sonny "Angel" Carmen - smuggled some priceless stolen artwork out of Germany and into the United States. Lewis, Stan and George become Hollywood movie producers, while Sonny disappears without a trace and is presumed dead. But what happens when not all goes as planned? A buyer for the stolen paintings made contact with Jerry Allen. It appears the deal of a lifetime is about to be made... but the specter of death hangs overhead. To complicate matters, a private investigator with a drinking problem - Dick Woodrow - is hired by a seductive and dangerous dame full of secrets- Helen Dean - to locate Jerry Allen. The investigation attracts an FBI agent - Harry Weinshack - and a beautiful Russian spy - Valentina Romanova - and everyone has a private agenda.

Greg Delaney deliciously plays Stan Goddard, a dastardly Hollywood movie producer desperate for his big score. One of a group of soldiers who made it out of WWII with a dark secret, he's ready to hit it big and nothing better stand in his way.

Quoting the website, and mirroring my own sentiments “Curtains is, above all, a labor of love; and proof that a quality product can be made successfully and - most of all - independently from the Hollywood circuit.”Be sure to check out Curtain’s website at http://curtainsfilmnoir.com/ for more information!

To view Greg's beautiful wearable art on Lady Nin's website,

Wearable
Art from the Mind of Greg Delaney