Maya Lin

"Storm King Wavefield," by Maya Lin

Maya Lin first gained fame with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982. She's gone on to do more memorials and fascinating art work, much of it based on natural features like hills and oceans.

I missed her show last year at the Henry Gallery here in Seattle. The NewsHour on PBS had a piece on one of the sculptures, made of thousands of boards stood on end to make a replica of a natural hill.

More intriguing is the New York Times' story about "Storm King Wavefield," an earthworks piece at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. The piece, seven rows of undulating hillocks, sits in a former gravel pit. The gentle hills mimick the surround landscape and also comment on the ancient seas that sculpted the site.

Lin's vision fascinates me. She makes us look at familiar things in new ways and finds art and sculpture in the natural world. Cool stuff.

Warmth, Giant Black Toobs

Seattle artist Susan Robb installed her artwork, "Warmth, Giant Black Toobs," at Volunteer Park today. She uses 50-foot polypropylene tubes that heat in the sun until they become buoyant and float.

The effect is amazing and, at first, a little unnerving. The tubes seem to come alive, moving and bumping in to each other, rising on the heat of the sun and a light breeze. When the sun goes behind a cloud, the tubes lay down on the grass but continue to move, nuzzling each other and competing for space.

At times, they reminded me of giant strands of hair; at others, like the water creature from "The Abyss." In the end, they are really their own thing, changing the space they inhabit and making us stop and look at the familiar in a new way. Everyone who came by, especially kids, loved them.

I produced a video of the piece for seattlepi.com.

Suzan-Lori Parks

I want to be Suzan-Lori Parks. She's smart, she's funny, she's talented and she just has that aura of coolness about her.

Maybe she'll adopt me.

Parks is the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama (for "Topdog/Underdog"). She spoke last night at the Seattle Arts and Lectures Series.

She mostly talked about how she became a writer. Her message is similar to Joseph Campbell's famous exhortation to "follow your bliss." Parks talked about being open to ideas when they come, no matter how weird they may seem, and then acting on them.

Parks began writing in the fourth grade. After a brief diversion into science in college (a high school teacher discouraged her from literature because she was a poor speller), she returned to her first love: writing. James Baldwin was one of her teachers and an important mentor.

When she heard voices talking to her and telling her stories, she wrote down what they said ("They come from that way," she said, gesturing to her left). She was afraid to turn around and look at the source of the voices for fear they would leave.

August Wilson described a similar experience. His plays began with a character coming to him and speaking. He would write the play to find out what the character was talking about.

One of the most important lessons Parks learned from Baldwin was to "honor the spirit" when it makes an appearance. When those voices come, when the spirit moves her to write, she embraces it and doesn't turn away. It takes guts and perseverance.

"Every morning when I wake up I tell myself; 'I want to be a writer today,'" she said. It's never too late to try something new, she said. The important thing is to follow what your gut tells you to do and then just do it.

One of Parks most recent ideas was to write a play every day for a year. She told her husband about it and he said: "That's cool." She immediately went upstairs and began to write. No matter where she was or what she was doing, she made sure to write a play every day. Most are short. The final play is all stage directions and no dialogue.

The resulting works -- "365 Days/365 Plays" -- are being produced by theaters all over the country, including Seattle.

It's all about faith, she told Hilton Als from The New Yorker:

“The writer has two kinds of faith: actual writing and sitting openly. Have faith in your personal effort or sweat. And faith in God, or whatever you want to call it. Then the voices will come.” She paused. “Faith is the big deal,” she said.

Suzan-Lori Parks links:

• Hilton Als New Yorker profile.
• 365 Days/365 Plays web site.
• Seattle365.com.
• Seattle P-I interview about the "365" project.
• NPR interview about the "365" project.

'Big Love' Poster

Kim Carney, a friend and former co-worker, has a terrific blog where she shows off all the cool art she does. Her work is a constant inspiration to me. I'm not in Kim's league, but I thought I'd show one example of my own work and talk a little about the process.

A good friend, Mary Martin, is directing a production of "Big Love" (definitely not the HBO series) by Charles Mee. It opens tonight (Feb. 8) at UACT in Roseburg, Oregon.

Mee's "Big Love" is based on an ancient Greek play, "The Danaids," by Aeschylus. In it, 50 brides (all sisters) are betrothed to 50 grooms (their cousins), but the brides run away before the wedding, landing in a large villa on the coast of Italy. The grooms swoop in by helicopter and all hell breaks out. Soon, people are tossing saw blades at each other and dropping tomatoes and throwing themselves on the ground over and over. And 49 of the bridges kill their grooms, leaving only one couple to fall in love.

"About the same odds as today," Mee writes.

Mee's subject is the nature of love and identity. Can anyone retain their identity when love and marriage consume them? Can a modern woman be true to her ideals in love? Must love end with marriage? Does everyone even have to fall in love?

Whew! How to convey all that in a simple poster?

A group of us retired to our cabin in the mountains to read the play and help Mary with her directing plans. There were lots of visual possibilities here: mangled wedding invitations, a bride and bashed-up groom from atop a wedding cake, blood, knives ... whatever. My initial idea was a simple type treatment: the words BIG LOVE with the LOVE all scratched out, as if one of the angry brides had gotten her revenge on the poster.

Not great but it was an idea. At least it gave us something to fall back on. I had even prepared copy for the poster:

50 brides.
50 grooms.
49 murders.
Can't we all just get along?

Not bad but ... not the greatest. I always say: You have to get the bad ideas out of the way before the good ones arrive.

During a second reading of the play a light dawned: one of the characters (a gay man) has a collection of Barbie and Ken dolls. Ah-ha! The original romantic couple! People would quickly grasp the idea that this is a play about love and relationships (or maybe they would think it was sponsored by Mattel).

I decided that a simple photo of Barbie and Ken just staring straight out from the poster would be the art. And I would play the name of the show large across their chests (it's southern Oregon; we have to cover of Barbie's bare breasts somehow).

It's cheesy but I substituted a heart for the "o" in "love." After finishing a version I decided that the heart made it look too happy and cute. God forbid, people might think it was a romantic comedy (it's funny, but dark).

Back to the original, all-type poster. I made some scratches in Illustrator and put them over the heart. It's just enough to let you know that there's something askew in this show and that it isn't all flowers and happy endings. If I'd have had time, it would have been fun to actually scribble and cut each poster individually.

Other elements on the page were dictated by UACT's design rules. I tinkered with running the BIG LOVE vertically between Ken and Barbie or turning the poster into landscape mode and putting BIG LOVE between them. The idea was that BIG LOVE is keeping the pair apart. That might have been cool but it wouldn't meet the design criteria.

Maybe next time.

Olympic Sculpture Park at night

I've been driving by the new Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle since it was a couple of polluted holes in the ground. Once the lights started to come on, I noticed how cool it looked at night and I had to take some photos. More pictures of the park after dark are located on my Flickr feed.

After these photos were up for a few days I received an e-mail from Burr Rutledge. He worked on the lighting for the park but left the firm before the job was done. He says that their goal was to let the lights do their job of illuminating the artwork without calling attention to themselves. I think they were successful.

Rutledge says he's heard that the Seattle Art Museum is now planning lighting for Richard Serra's "Wake."