Probably the greatest thing about the Prairie Roots project was a mistake. 

Each of the poles was painted a color, and so there are four colors, and the original idea was that the poles would all be aligned–they would all be oriented in the same way, so that if you’re standing on one side, all you’ll see really is red, and then as you move around it, it’ll transition to orange and green and yellow, because it’s a circular thing.  And that was the idea.  

And it’s a lot of trouble to paint four colors on one square pole.  It’s a lot of process, there’s a lot of taping, it’s very exact work.  There’s a lot of transferring pieces in the paint shop back and forth.  There’s an industrial painter here–they do awesome work. It’s IPS–Industrial Paint Solutions.  They’ve got an aircraft hangar.  They do bridges and everything else.  

But we’re out on the site in this freezing weather, ready to install these poles, and the poles are all there in the snow of course. We installed the first one, and whenever these kind of things go up where there’s a lot of pieces, I always get scared anyway because it looks like nothing.  I think, how is this going to be interesting?  Even when there’s six, it doesn’t look that great.  Until there’s like 25, maybe you can start seeing it…  But we installed one, fine.  And then we installed the second one, and tried to orient it just like the first one so that the red was facing one way, and it was impossible.  You couldn’t rotate it so that would happen.  The only way you could do it is turn it upside down, which you couldn’t do because they’re pre-drilled to fit on that metal pole that’s coming out of the concrete.  And I think it was on just the second one, I realized something was wrong!  And so we did the third pole, and it was the same problem, it could only match one of the other poles.  And that was the entire concept, or a big part of it.

I’ve run into this feeling many times–it’s a familiar feeling of stomach churning, dropping, wanting to faint, kind of that weak weird feeling.  What am I going to do?  But I have learned over the years to not completely freak out.  Instead, I quickly move to a new level, trying to understand–what in the world is going on here?  Something’s not right.  Also trying to understand what the ramifications are and whether it’s a bad thing or a good thing.  Because it might be a bad thing.  But it might not.  And I used to think that it was a bad thing all the time because it wasn’t what I planned.  But then I realized it could actually be a better thing than I had planned.

But essentially, there was no way that these things could be oriented the way I had planned.  Because on the drawings for the painter, when I described how I wanted these pieces painted, I did very detailed drawing, giving the number of each piece, but I didn’t put on the page “top” and “bottom.”  And there was a big difference between the top and the bottom.  They’re totally different.  Each one of these poles.  So when the painters would paint a color and then they would transfer them, they didn’t pay any attention to which was top and bottom.  They followed my instructions…! 

Anyway, the upshot of the whole thing is–I really had no choice.  I had to get this thing done.  Everybody’s out there, it’s three degrees, I’ve paid them, I’m out in Marshall, it’s 3 and a half hours from home.  This is a very expensive paint job…  So I made the decision to move forward.

And the arts guy was there too, my contact, and I was honest with him.  I mean, he could see that I was about to faint, he knew something was wrong.  But I realized after we got a few more of these put up that an interesting thing started happening.  So all the reds were still facing one way, and the greens, because they were on opposite sides of the poles.  It was the orange and yellows that were all mixed up.  And I still wasn’t sure that was a good thing.  But it ended up really great, because they’re randomly varying, you know, so you can be standing on two of the sides, and you’re getting a variation that’s blending, so you’re seeing yellow-orange, instead of all orange, all yellow, and the prairie is like that. 

But really, I guess the big huge journey that happened was from disaster, feeling like it was a disaster to being open minded enough to realize that it was actually a better thing.

That is not always the case.  There are some things that you can’t say, oh that’s even better, or that’s great.  Sometimes it’s just a do-over.  But that one was better.  It was a discovery.

Marshall, prairie roots, public art