As I rode home this fall I came across this tree which had just lost all of its leaves. It was an amazing burst of color and it was as if someone flipped the switch off for whatever held all those leaves to the tree. One day they were all on the tree and the next there was a perfect bright yellow blanket below it. I decided this would be a great place for my first project.
That night I penciled out a few concepts I had been thinking about all evening and went back to visit the tree to see if the idea I liked would work. I knew that this would be a time sensitive project if the wind decided to pick up my perfect sea of yellow would be scattered across the park. I did my test and it worked out just as well as I hoped. The next thing I had to decide was what I was going say. Look which is the name of this project would have been fine but not what I was wanting. Yellow would have stated the obvious but seemed kind of boring. I decided I wanted to make people not just notice a word in the leaves but question it and ponder why someone would choose to write red in this large blanket of yellow. Now I know exactly what I want to say and do.
I drew up some plans for the word to be seen from quite a distance away I want it to make a real impact on the viewer not just in the fact it is an oddity seeing letter forms in the leaves but in the size they were written as well. I scaled my letters out at 8ft tall and 4ft wide. This size seemed large enough paper but when I got on site that morning I figured out it was about half the size I needed to have the impact I wanted.
We all got out on site early the next day and began to clear away the leaves revealing the very dark green grass that lay below it was a very nice contrast. I would lay out each stroke and the kids would help me clear the leaves. We would take the discarded leaves and rebroadcast them out across the rest of the yellow so it looked as nothing else was disturbed. After about 3 hours the project was complete.
My wife took the kids home and I stayed to watch how people would react as they passed by. I was pretty amazed really in the level to which people don’t take their eyes off the path they are walking, jogging or riding. I had a few people who would glance and then take a second hard look but keep moving along without missing a stride. Most people just kept their head down never looking up to make sure the sky is still in the place it is supposed to be. I did have 2 groups of people over the course of the afternoon actually stop and walk over to take a closer look. One group decided they needed to take some pictures to share with their friends. It will be interesting over the course of this project to see what it is that will make people look at what is going on around them.
No comments:
Post a Comment