Day One: Saturday: The prairie dog colony on town hall.
As public artists we have made a career roaming the large surfaces of substantial urban centers. Skyscrapers, skynuggers and skyaspiring buildings have given us hundreds of thousands of square feet to draw on. On our first tour of Ridgefield we were absolutely fascinated with how centralized the city was to a single intersection. Working through the museum, we felt it was important to do a prominent public mural to start with and nothing seemed like it was more at the center of everything than Town Hall. The museum made the efforts to contact the proper folks there at town hall and we were graciously given permission to draw on this historic building with the usual assurances that the tape would not pull the front off the building.
For the purposes of drawing, the Ridgefield Town Hall provides very little continuous space to construct a drawing. The drawing is at an intersection with a stoplight that stops cars in such a way that they are able to genuinely spend time inspecting the mural. On top of that the drawing is on a major route for pedestrians. In fact, on the Saturday we started this mural we saw more people walking about in that one day than we would in a whole month in Providence. Walking is cool in Ridgefield.
The decision making process for the content basically went along these lines:
1. We decided that because we were dealing with only 50% of the buildings surfaces or less because we were not going to draw on the windows - then we had to make a dense impact. No matter what, we would basically fill as much of the building as we could with a dense field of green that would engulf the building. This large plane of green would signal the buildings transformation to drivers regardless of how fast they passed by. We had just acquired some four-inch wide version of our tape and were in more-than-the-mood to start filling in a building.
2. The surface area that we could fill-in would be determined by the reach of our ladders. From our homebase we had brought a modest six-foot ladder and from the museum we had borrowed, in leu of finding a tall extension ladder, a very tall (15 feet) A-frame ladder. This large ladder needs a big footprint to be safely opened and secure. That big footprint limits where it can go and we assessed quickly that we could get up highest on the right side, but it our access to the wall sloped down on a quick diagonal to the left base of the building. So, if you were to reach the highest point you could on the ladders we had, you would make a line that was indistinguishable from the classic slope of a gently rolling hill. We were drawing a hill now.
3. This hill would be filled in with solid green, but visually we thought it was really important that there were diagonals cutting through it that exposed the brick of the building. Having made the decision that the green plane we were drawing was some form of terrain, we brainstormed about what could cause rippling, cleared spaces. Perhaps some sort of burrowing creature? The world of burrowing creatures is pretty vast. It includes aardvarks, badgers, mongooses, rabbits and all types of small mammals and rodents. Also, for good record, you can add to that list tortoises, clams, worms and lots of types of insects. Looking around at all the loving families we decided that the intensely communal animal that is the prairie dog was a good fit for this space. Green building with burrowed spaces = prairie dog colony.
4. Our primary interests in the mural was to create great green spaces on surfaces all around the Town Hall. From a narrative viewpoint we decided it was really important to have humans interacting with the hill and the prairie dogs. We wanted two people on the hill point to the dogs coming out of their little holes and we wanted a third to have woken up, in pajamas and holding a candle, inside one of the prairie dog caverns.
We originally drew the prairie dogs as green, but they were completely unreadable and didn't look that good. Across the street we purchased some inferior painters tape with comes in dark blue. The blue looked great with the green and helped us use the prairie dogs more strategically as a distribution of color to make the drawing look better.
It was a beautifully sunny day and we spent well over half of our time drawing, engaged in conversation with those passing by. We had the luxury of being in the sun all day which made it particularly cruel when the sun set and the temperature dropped to 32 degrees. To be honest, we had not really prepared ourselves for roughing it outside in Ridgefield, and we bared the freezing temperatures in a sweatshirt. By the time we left around 11 we both had hands that had marbleized with various shades of pink, light purple and shades of red and any fingers that had been previously broken took the opportunity to swell. We abandoned the drawing when it was compositionally solid and planned to revisit it first thing on the following morning.
Sunday morning brought the last of the prairie dogs and their human admirers. We cleaned up a lot of our lines and made sure all the tape was patted down because of rain predictions for the next couple of days. Sure enough it rained like crazy for two days. The torrents of rain saturated the green, but it held on tight in most places. The prairie dogs had a tough go of it, and we had to tear some down that had been drowned out. When we would go through town and stop at that stoplight, Michael would dash out of the car and make corrections, remove damaged tape, throw the trash in the adjoining trash bin and be back in the car before the light turned green.
After a week of weather conditions that included torrential rain moments and gusting wind the tape had been pushed to its limit. We were able to tear down the entire mural in eleven minutes. We tore it down on Thursday night.
