Ellensburg Artist Transforms Reflectors Into Luminous Sculptures

ELLENSBURG - Imagine standing in a kaleidoscope, with the colors and shapes changing and shifting as you look around.

That's the effect Dick Elliott is hoping for as he plans a summer art exhibit in a Great Falls, Mont., gallery. Multicolored neon lights and reflectors will combine for the unique experience.

"It surrounds you. When you're in there - and I haven't built this yet, so it's still in my mind - as you move around the piece, the shifts will be really something," he said.

"It'll shift from like the blue light to white light to yellow light to red light, and it'll happen in a matter of a foot."

Elliott's gallery pieces are designed to change with shifts of light or perspective.

The artist began working with reflectors in the early 1980s, getting them from bicycle shops and secondhand stores. In 1987, he began buying in bulk from a manufacturer, which allowed him to begin creating huge works.

His large works can be seen decorating the Yakima Sundome, two water towers in Pateros, Okanogan County, and the University of Washington's Henry Gallery in Seattle, as well as in New York's Times Square. Elliott was asked last year to create an artpiece on a 17-foot-high, 30-foot-long brick wall in New York as part of the 42nd Street Development Project.

"People love it," said Wendy Leventer, vice president for planning and design for the project. "You see it one way during the day, but it really catches your eye at night in a different way."

Elliott, too, is proud of the piece. "I designed it the day before I started," he said.

It was being mesmerized by roadside reflectors that led Elliott into the medium.

"They were a mysterious object to me. You'd drive a country highway and people would put up a whole bunch of them to mark their driveway," Elliott said.

"This little bit of light would come out of nowhere, get brighter and brighter and brighter and then it'd get really intense and then it would disappear."

But something was missing.

"One of the things I haven't been happy with in my installations is the light sources," Elliott said. "You fill a room full of reflectors and then the light is important. You have to have it at eye level."

When he received a $5,000 sculpting grant last June from the Western States Art Federation, which administers funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, he used it to learn to create his own light sources. He studied for three months at the Neon Art and Tube Bending School in Portland.

Elliott's wife, Jane Orleman, is also an artist, and their home is a popular stop for tourists, who gape at the crooked fence covered with reflectors, bottle caps, bicycle wheels that move with the wind and female figures with large reflectors for breasts.

The front gate has an exit sign and blue footsteps are painted on the sidewalk leading away from the front door. A display explains, "What is this place: Art for the heart, from the heart, in the heart of Washington. Remember, one hearty laugh is worth 10 trips to the doctor."